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. […]
The Greek city-states, the “pòleis”, were designed, starting from the VIII century BC, with the aim of fostering the communal decisions and the sharing of philosophical knowledge. Almost thirty centuries later, our cities do not always seem to be planned to be people-oriented. On the contrary, our urban areas, which are home to more than […]
Imagine you are a leader of the group, a CEO of a well-known firm. Your job is to guide people to achieve something together. As a businessman first thing that pops into your head, in order to make people work harder, is the simplest way: I should pay them more. If I want a group […]
A famous Norwegian proverb says: “Tomorrow I shall begin a better life. I think . . .” Probably everyone can somehow relate to this proverb – some of us want to quit smoking but fail, some of us want to exercise more but fail, some of us want to read more but fail. There are so many ways of how […]
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