An overview on economic and financial behavior

On November 3, Edgar Demetrio Tovar-García, PhD in Economics, University of Barcelona, Associate Professor of the Department of Public Policy (Faculty of Social Sciences, HSE) took part in the «Culture Matters» research seminar with the presentation of the program of the course "Money and Finacial Behavior" for master’s program "Applied social psychology" and made a report on "An overview on economic and financial behavior".

Nobel laureate in Economics 2002, Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky have largely changed the views of economists on the rationality of human behavior that begins with Adam Smith. They began to study it in an interdisciplinary way using knowledge from psychology.

Today behavioral finance is quite a dynamically developing branch of knowledge closely associated with psychology. Heuristics, framing, emotions, the influence of the market have significant impact on human behavior.

Why do people behave in a certain way in times of crisis? Why do people invest money in a financial pyramid? What strategies are used in situations of risk or in case of need of borrowing money? These and many other questions will be studied during this course.

Marcel Zeelenberg, professor and the head of Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, who was attending the presentation, approved the concept of the course and made some suggestions for improving it.