Judgment and Decision Making - Period 1

This course provides an overview of scientific research on judgment & decision making, where psychology and economics collide and collaborate to understand human behavior. It provides you with the basic knowledge of theories, concepts and methods that is necessary to understand how decisions are made. The course is inspired by the groundbreaking, nobel-prize winning work of Tversky and Kahneman (Nobel prize 2002), Thaler (Nobel prize 2017) as well as other seminal work and research programmes of other leading thinkers in the field (and society). One of the main topics of the course will be the question of how and when humans deviate from rational thinking. This is captured by a well- documented array of heuristics and biases, that help us to make reasonable and accurate decisions in some areas, but may crucially misguide us in others. We will discuss eye-opening research that documents several well-known biases as well as focus on mental accounting, loss/gain framing, forecasting, visceral influences, motivated reasoning and (dis)honesty.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.