Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics

At a time when both scholars and the public demand explanations and answers to key economic problems that conventional approaches have failed to resolve, this groundbreaking handbook of original works by leading behavioral economists offers the first comprehensive articulation of behavioral economics theory. Borrowing from the findings of psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and biologists, among others, behavioral economists find that intelligent individuals often tend not to behave as effectively or efficiently in their economic decisions as long held by conventional wisdom. The manner in which individuals actually do behave critically depends on psychological, institutional, cultural, and even biological considerations. "Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics" includes coverage of such critical areas as the Economic Agent, Context and Modeling, Decision Making, Experiments and Implications, Labor Issues, Household and Family Issues, Life and Death, Taxation, Ethical Investment and Tipping, and Behavioral Law and Macroeconomics. Each contribution includes an extensive bibliography.

Morris Altman received his Ph.D. in economics from McGill University. He is a former visiting scholar at Cornell, Duke, Hebrew, and Stanford universities, is professor and head of the Department of Economics at the University of Saskatchewan, and is an elected fellow of the World Innovation Foundation (WIF). He is president of the Society for Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE) and is editor of the Journal of Socio-Economics. Altman has published more than seventy scholarly papers in behavioral economics, economic history, institutional economics, and empirical macroeconomics. He has also published Human Agency and Material Welfare: Revisions in Microeconomics and Their Implications for Public Policy (1996) and Worker Satis[1]faction and Economic Performance (2001) and is currently completing two other books, one related to behavioral labor and the other to behavioral growth theory. He is also currently writing on issues related to economics and ethics, choice behavior, human and labor rights and growth, and the methodologies underlying behavioral economics.