ew
“Money makes the world go round”. Financial decisions impact not only individuals, but also whole countries and the global community. Therefore, it stands to reason that we should know more about behavioral economics and the repercussions of poor financial knowledge. A new book edited by Professor Tomasz Zaleśkiewicz and Associate Professor Jakub Traczyk discusses various aspects of financial decision making.
Almost every day, people make financial decisions. How do they make them? To what extent do these decisions depend on rational calculations and to what degree are they influenced by emotions? Why do people fall into debt? What drives people to avoid taxes? Do human beings like gambling? What do people know about finances and what are the consequences of not being savvy in this subject? What can modern brain science teach us about our financial decisions?
Answers to these intriguing questions can be found in a new book “Psychological Perspectives on Financial Decision Making” edited by Tomasz Zaleskiewicz and Jakub Traczyk and published by Springer, New York. The book includes several chapters written by excellent experts in such fields as the psychology of decision making and behavioral economics. The authors take the evidence-based approach and refer to recent empirical evidence, but also show how scientific knowledge about financial decision-making can be applied in practice. The understanding of how lay people, who are not experts in economics, make hard financial choices is especially important when we are facing a severe economic recession caused by the pandemic.
Recommendations
“Readers of this book will come away with an appreciation of how financial decisions are impacted by the way we are wired, and how that wiring is impacted by a variety of contextual and demographic factors.”
Professor Hersh Shefrin, world-renowned economist, one of the founders of behavioral economics