Here are 100 books that Prospect Theory fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
From this book, I learned that cognitive errors and human misbehaviours are not necessarily in contradiction to rationality.
It taught me that the generally negative perspective on psychological mechanisms provided by behavioural economics is limited. By contrast, a deeper understanding of what rationality means is needed. This book enriched my own way of analyzing how psychological factors impact daily decisions.
For a long time, economists have assumed that we were cold, self-centred, rational decision makers - so-called Homo economicus; the last few decades have shattered this view. The world we live in and the situations we face are of course rich and complex, revealing puzzling aspects of our behaviour. Optimally Irrational argues that our improved understanding of human behaviour shows that apparent 'biases' are good solutions to practical problems - that many of the 'flaws' identified by behavioural economics are actually adaptive solutions. Page delivers an ambitious overview of the literature in behavioural economics and, through the exposition of these…
I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
The book was, for me, an inspiring journey and an enriching learning experience. While conventional behavioral finance tends to analyze deviations from rationality within economic decisions, this book diverges, offering a holistic behavioral framework.
I like that the book views individuals not merely as economic agents but as complete beings, with financial well-being acting as a gauge for overall life prosperity. I believe that Prof. Statman's third generation of behavioral finance represents a paradigm shift towards a constructive scientific approach. I fully share its primary objective to empower individuals in their pursuit of personal fulfillment and satisfaction.
Unravel the complex relationship between finances and life well-being
In A Wealth of Well-Being: A Holistic Approach to Behavioral Finance, Professor Meir Statman, established thought leader in behavioral finance, explores how life well-being, the overarching aim of individuals in the third generation of behavioral finance, is underpinned by financial well-being, and how life well-being extends beyond financial well-being to family, friendship, religion, health, work, and education.
Combining recent scientific findings by scholars in finance, economics, law, medicine, psychology, and sociology with real-life stories at the intersection of finances and life, this book allows readers to clearly see how finances are…
I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
This book inspired me to apply quantitative and theoretical models to analyse the impact of human psychology on financial decision-making. The book is sometimes a bit technical, but I felt that that the explanations around the mathematical requirements sufficiently supported the development of my own intuition about their economic and psychological motivation.
I learned from this book how to combine economic theory and psychology to explain empirical and experimental evidence on asset prices. As a mathematician, I was excited to learn how Prof. Shefrin mathematically included psychological factors in classical models for financial decision-making and analyzed the implications for asset prices.
Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory.
I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
As a mathematician, I learned that constraints could push us away from optimality. Well, we still seek for optimality, but under constraints we can only be worse off than without. Reading this book, I learned that our life has plenty of unnecessary constraints that Prof. Sunstein calls sludge.
This book was a revelation because I was always tempted to consider misbehavior as a lack of judgment, self-control, etc. However, this book gave me a different perspective. Maybe as human beings, we strive for optimality, but the many constraints out there do not always allow us to act like a Homo Economicus.
The New York Times–bestselling author of Nudge reveals how we became so burdened by red tape and unnecessary paperwork—and why we must do better.
“If nudges have a mortal enemy, or perhaps the equivalent of antimatter to matter, it’s ‘sludge’.” —Forbes
We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge—filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up—and…
I’m an economist who started out in stockbroking. But that felt like an exploitative industry and, looking for a more positive role, I moved to the consumer organisation Which? There, I cut my teeth helping people make the most of their money and then started my own freelance business. Along the way, I’ve worked with many clients (including financial regulators and the Open University where I now also teach), taken some of the exams financial advisers do and written 30 or so books on personal finance. The constant in my work is trying to empower individuals in the face of markets and systems that are often skewed against them.
US economist Frank Knight is credited with distinguishing uncertainty from risk back in 1921. Yet the two are often conflated.
Kay (an eminent economist) and King (a former Governor of the Bank of England) argue powerfully that the distinction does matter. They range widely across macroeconomics, politics, and consumer choices to show why reducing the future to a set of numbers (probabilities) creates a false – and often disastrous – illusion of power over future outcomes.
They argue that instead we should aim to make decisions that stand a reasonable chance of being robust against unknowable, as well as forecastable, paths that the future might take. That’s very much the ethos of my own books: building in resilience is a key part of successful personal financial planning.
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry's actuarial tables and the gambler's roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000,…
I'm co-founder of a grassroots social justice, civic engagement, and service organization called ForwardCT, which I started with my friend and current state representative Eleni Kavros DeGraw with the intention of mobilizing community-centered action. Our work centers on these four pillars: Connect, Inform, Serve, and Lead. Those pillars guide my work as chair of my town’s Clean Energy Commission, as teacher and facilitator of workshops and events, and as an author of books for young people. I'm drawn to the powerful use of storytelling as a tool for starting conversations, stirring up “good trouble,” and inspiring activism. Read a book, approach your library or town to host a community conversation, leave with actionable takeaways, repeat!
As someone who hoarded toilet paper weeks before the 2020 shortage, I relate to the frustration of watching history repeat itself (or at least rhyme with itself) because people are often too distracted to focus on planning for looming crises.
Bina Venkataraman gets to the “why” of this often-fatal flaw as she explores the nature of human decision-making. This book provides tangible narratives as a springboard to answer these questions: How can we use wisdom from our ancestors to better inform our personal, professional, and policy decisions? How can we incentivize (or glitter bomb) long-term planning? And how can we see ourselves as future ancestors in order to be better stewards of the planet?
A perfect selection for corporate, government, and non-profit retreats and professional development conferences!
“How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review
A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s.
Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for…
I’ve been an independent investor for nearly 25 years. In my previous life as an employee, I was a research actuary for a firm of pension consultants, and then a university lecturer. I left my last academic job at the age of 35 because I had made enough money to survive, and freedom was worth more to me than a salary. FIRE (Financial Independence – Retire Early) is what it’s called these days, but with two differences. First, I’m not retired: I spend most of my time on investing, but entirely on my own terms. Second, and relatedly, I’m an active investor, albeit a cheap one, nearly as cheap as an index fund.
All investing is risk-taking, and this is the best book on risk-taking that I know. Not just risk-taking as mathematics or games (although both of those are important), but risk-taking as a philosophy of life.
I would pick out two main insights. First, risk is intrinsically neither good nor bad, it is just a dial you can turn up or down. Second, your aim should be neither to minimise nor maximise risk, but rather to take the right amount of risk, and so achieve what this book calls “risk ignition”.
One contextual caveat: the value I see here is a deep understanding of risk, not specific recipes.
An innovative guide that identifies what distinguishes the best financial risk takers from the rest
From 1987 to 1992, a small group of Wall Street quants invented an entirely new way of managing risk to maximize success: risk management for risk-takers. This is the secret that lets tiny quantitative edges create hedge fund billionaires, and defines the powerful modern global derivatives economy. The same practical techniques are still used today by risk-takers in finance as well as many other fields. Red-Blooded Risk examines this approach and offers valuable advice for the calculated risk-takers who need precise quantitative guidance that will…
My sons were both reluctant readers and that made me want to write books that they wouldn’t be able to resist reading! Reading should be a pleasure and this list is packed with books that are impossible to put down. They are perfect for young, reluctant readers, as they are not trying to be too serious or worthy or overwhelming with too much text. They pull you in and hook you from the start and you can’t help being moved by the characters as they grow and develop, fostering a love of books and fiction. I love comedy in books, but funny books also have to have heart, believable characters, and a great plot that keeps you reading till the very end.
This book is totally hilarious! It’s really pacy, utterly wacky, and laugh-out-loud silly. The pages are packed with lots of funny illustrations so none of the text seems overwhelming or goes on too long. It’s a handbook on how to avoid danger, written by Dr. Noel Zone, the greatest (and only) "dangerologist" in the world, and covers sneaky snakes posing as toothbrushes, sharks hiding in toilets, to robots disguised as kindly grandmas. My son, a reluctant reader first listened to the audiobook- which is narrated fantastically (we were in fits of giggles listening to it in the car), and then he happily and quickly read the second two books in the series. I think audiobooks are a fantastic way to get kids hooked on new characters and discover new authors.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets The Dangerous Book for Boys, DANGER IS EVERYWHERE is a brilliantly funny handbook for avoiding danger of all kinds that will have everyone from reluctant readers to bookworms laughing out loud (very safely) from start to finish.
DOES IT WARN YOU ABOUT WHAT TO DO IF A SHARK COMES UP OUT OF THE LOO WHILE YOU ARE SITTING ON IT? Yes it does.
AND HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOUR GRANNY IS A ROBOT? That too.
AND WHAT TO DO IF A VOLCANO ERUPTS UNDERNEATH YOUR HOUSE? After you've made sure it's not a…
I’m Darius Foroux (pronounced Dare-eus For-oe), and thanks for exploring my recommendations. As a former mutual funds advisor, I understand the complexity of finance, a lesson driven home when I lost two-thirds of my investment in 2007. Not wanting to repeat my costly mistakes, I earned degrees in business and finance, launched a business, and continuously educated myself on investing. The biggest thing I learned? Investing and wealth-building aren’t logical but emotional. I'm passionate about helping others achieve financial independence and live on their terms. My book empowers you to manage your emotions, build wealth, and enjoy life, regardless of the stock market's ups and downs.
This book taught me a great deal about how managing risk differed between modern and past times. This helped me to spot whether a “prediction” is likely to happen. (In investing, plenty of “experts” often like to predict a crash, a bull market, or a bubble).
Humanity used to rely on oracles and soothsayers to have a clearer vision of what the future would bring. Questions like: What jobs would be in demand in X years? What kind of risks should we prepare for in our lives and careers? Which companies would grow or go bust? With the right mindset and risk management tools, I’ve learned to answer these questions better.
A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable ...an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." -The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." -The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book ...Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." -Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." -The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." -Worth "No one…
I’m a storyteller writing on business and technology. I specialize in clear views of complex systems. When Juliette showed me her research on tech companies and AI responsibility, I saw the power of a book – the book that ultimately became The AI Dilemma. The core dilemma is that in the right hands the technology is needed, and in the wrong hands it’s dangerous. When Juliette asked me to coauthor it, I jumped at the chance. As we worked, I realized that the topic brought into focus all the research and thinking I’d ever done about human, organizational, and machine behavior.
Another classic, which influenced my book. Ron is the founder of RiskThinking AI, which focuses on the financial effects of climate change.
His fascinating stories include one of the first fatalities from self-driving cars, when it struck a woman with a bicycle running to cross the road. Any human driver would have seen an uncertain image and slowed down, playing out a group of possible scenarios. But AI hasn’t learned that kind of humility.
Eventually, when it does, the machines and people will learn how to manage risk together, and that will lead to more courage. The best part of this book is his insight into how the use of new technology changes human behavior.
Our age of radical uncertainty requires a new way of assessing risk that pays more attention to the extreme outliers that too often become tomorrow’s reality.
Today’s models cannot cope with the frightening new unpredictable risks we face every day that frequently seem to come out of left field – the effects of climate change, a killer pandemic, a cascading wildfire, a financial crisis triggered by faceless algorithms, or a devastating cyber-attack that shuts down the electric power grid.
This accessible book advocates a new, more realistic approach to analyzing risk and strategizing—one that is less reliant on a single…
