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Monday, February 25th

HarperCollins

Price: $25.95

DAN ARIELY discusses Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome MIT professor DAN ARIELY to explain the Predictably Irrational.

Do you know why you still have a headache after taking a one-cent aspirin, but why that same headache disappears if the aspirin costs fifty cents? Do you know why, after doing careful and extensive research on which car to buy, a random meeting with someone who had an awful experience with that car changes your decision? Why do we make decisions contrary to our better judgment? What is "better judgment?"

If the behaviors that skew our judgments were random or senseless, we'd be hard put to sort them out and make better decisions. But research has shown that our irrationality is, in fact, systematic. People will make the same types of mistakes over and over, in a predictable manner, because the behaviors have structural origins. So recognizing them and understanding them offers us a way to do better.

CONTACT:

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617.661.1515

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617.661.1424 ex.1

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Dr. Dan Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, where he holds a joint appointment between MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the Sloan School of Management. He is also a visiting scholar at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and a fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science, CNN, NPR, and he was interviewed for ABC's 20/20 segment on Freakonomics.