The great technological progress we have witnessed in the last twenty years has allowed us to collect and generate a huge amount of data at an unprecedented rate, leading to the beginning of the so-called Big Data era. Nowadays we are relying more and more on algorithms and Big Data analytics to make decisions and evaluate services and employees. But can […]
While most countries have begun the process of vaccinating against coronavirus, the data about who is getting vaccinated- or more importantly, who isn’t – are troubling. First, those least vulnerable to COVID-19 are being vaccinated before the highly at-risk individuals who don’t make or don’t attend their vaccination appointments. Second, vaccination rates are substantially lower amongst ethnic […]
Flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”.
In their book Nicola Gennaioli, professor of finance at Bocconi University, and Andrei Shleifer, professor of economics at Harvard University “A Crisis of Beliefs” give the reader a novel interpretation of the 2008 crisis as well as the tools to understand financial instability on a larger scale. This book is a summary of the authors’ research and it is effective because it gives the possibility to almost everyone […]
Diplomacy has deeply ancient roots: historians and anthropologists found traces of it in the Middle East, China, and India in the first millennium BCE. Chinese diplomatic apparatus included leagues, missions, a system of polite discourses between “warring states”, and even resident envoys who served as hostages to guarantee the good behavior of those who sent […]
How is voting behaviour influenced by cognitive biases? In which ways does social interaction affect the beliefs of individuals? And what are the psychological determinants of support for either a liberal or conservative ideology? The event held on April 7, 2021 answered these and more questions, offering us some insight on the behavioural and psychological underpinnings of political preferences of voters. With Bocconi Professor Catherine De Vries as our moderator, we invited as our speakers Dan Braha, Full Professor at University of Massachusetts, and Yoel Inbar, Associate […]
How to succeed in a startup business? Well, there is no cookie-cutter approach that works universally. Every business has a set of unique characterizing elements and has to find its optimal organizational balance. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the success factors, which sometimes can be summarized with “luck”, there is an often overlooked commonality behind startup business failures which can be analyzed through behavioral lenses. A well-known statistic is that 9 out of […]
Since Daniel Goleman published his best-selling book “Emotional intelligence” in 1995 and brought this concept to the attention of the public, it has been widely appreciated but also debated and criticized. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify, express and manage one’s own as well as others’ emotions. Its four main components are self-awareness, […]
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” —Alexander Pope “Why do fools rush in?” Maybe they suffer from availability bias, a simple rule of thumb or mental shortcut that causes people to estimate the probability of an outcome based on how prevalent or familiar that outcome appears in their lives. People exhibiting this kind […]
Some conspiracies are, to a certain extent, fun. Take, for instance, the absurd claims that Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, is an illegitimate son of Fidel Castro. The story went viral in 2018. It was quite inconsequential, and it seems fair to say that most of the people sharing it didn’t take it too seriously. […]
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