Optimally Irrational: The Hidden Benefits of Bad Instincts

Optimally Irrational: The Hidden Benefits of Bad Instincts provides economists, social scientists and researchers in behavioral economics with a clear view of the frontier of research in economics and other behavioral sciences, including how the different biases unveiled by behavioral economics make sense when we try to optimize problems. The book evaluates the role of bias in human economic behavior, considers the human decision-making processes as the product of natural selection, and explores why we behave the way we do.

• Discusses how we think about, and adopt, apparently irrational behaviors and biases in empirical research
• Explains how biases may be adaptive solutions to well-posed optimization problems under constraints
• Unites advances in behavioral economics with those from other behavioral sciences and evolutionary biology