verhaltensökonomischer

Verhaltensökonomik, often translated as behavioral economics, is a field that combines insights from psychology and economics to understand how people make decisions. It challenges traditional economic models that assume perfect rationality by acknowledging that human behavior is often influenced by cognitive biases, emotions, and social factors.

Key concepts in verhaltensökonomik include heuristics, which are mental shortcuts people use to make decisions quickly, and biases, which are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. For example, loss aversion describes the tendency for people to feel the pain of a loss more strongly than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Prospect theory, developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is a foundational model explaining how people choose between probabilistic alternatives that involve risk, where the probabilities of outcomes are known.

The field explores various phenomena such as framing effects, where the way information is presented influences choices, and the endowment effect, where people value something they own more highly than something they do not. Verhaltensökonomik has practical applications in areas like public policy, marketing, and personal finance, aiming to design interventions that nudge individuals towards more beneficial choices. It provides a more realistic understanding of economic agents by incorporating psychological realism into economic analysis.