BizSugar.com › Marketing › The Emerging Importance of Behavioral Science in Economics and Marketing

I bet not many of my readers can't wait till the next book on economics comes out. Well, rarely having any interest myself in such books, I have been quite surprised by the extent to which two recent books from high priests of the dismal science held my attention.

The first book I read was Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely is a pioneer thinker in the new branch of economics called “behavioral economics.” Amazingly, over 235 years after Adam Smith famously claimed that the movement of markets was caused by an “invisible hand” that reflected people's rational decisions taken on their own behalf, mainstream economics mainstream economists are beginning to suspect that the “rational” part of people's decisions has been overplayed.