Every leader should know the surprising research and strange conclusions of behavioral economics--for fairness, teamwork and productivity You and your colleagues don’t always make rational decisions. Sometimes that's a problem that leaders must address, and and sometimes that can be a good thing--when employees put their colleagues interests ahead of their own. Dr. Matthias Sutter, a leading economist from Germany's world-renowned Max Planck Institute explains the latest surprising insights based on behavioral economics research. The book explains how people tick, how they react to incentives (monetary or non-monetary in nature) and what that means for working together—or against each other—at work. Dr. Sutter summarizes new and classic behavorial science research that applies the everyday business world, so leaders can improve teams and organizations, the research-based way. Find out which factors are important for professional success, from career entry to senior management. Start your career on the right footing, advance quicker, and strategize how to meet your goals Understand what’s holding your colleagues back from productivity and implement evidence-based changes Identify hidden biases in yourself and others to overcome inequalities and inefficiencies Become a better leader and decision-maker by learning to interpret people’s actions Individuals, organizations, and teams will benefit from the often-counterintuitive wisdom in this book. Based on the author’s 20 years of research—plus the findings of the world’s top behavioral economists—Behavioral Economics for Leaders can help you get your team and your organization where you want to lead it.

Economic theory and empirical evidence establish that economic preferences predict behavior and life outcomes for children, adolescents, and adults. In this paper, we use novel data on 4,282 siblings aged 6 to 16 that combine incentivized measures of time, risk, and social preferences with comprehensive information on child behavior and family environment. Using standard cross-sectional specifications, our results confirm the predictive power of children's preferences for behavior. However, when estimating household fixed effects models that allow controlling forall characteristics that are shared by siblings, this predictive power largely vanishes. We discuss implications for research on children's preferences and behavior.

Lack of information about COVID-19 and its spread may have contributed to excess mortality at the pandemic's onset, In April and May 2020, we implemented a randomized controlled trial with more than 3,000 households in 150 Bangladeshi villages, Our one-to-one information campaign via phone stressed the importance of social distancing and hygiene measures, and illustrated the consequences of an exponential spread of COVID-19, We find that information provision improves knowledge about COVID-19 and induces significant behavioral changes. Information provision also yields considerably better health outcomes, most importantly by reducing the number of reported deaths by about 50% in treated villages.

Erfolg hat, wer geduldig ist Geduld ist eine Tugend, wenn auch eine scheinbar altmodische. Wer möchte heutzutage noch lange mit ungestillten Sehnsüchten und unerfüllten Wünschen leben? Matthias Sutter, einer der führenden Wirtschaftsforscher im deutschsprachigen Raum, verhilft der vernachlässigten Qualität Geduld zu einem fulminanten Comeback. Seine eindrucksvollen und wissenschaftlich etablierten Studien führen zur überraschenden Erkenntnis: Geduld ist gleich viel wert wie Talent! Anhand erstaunlicher Forschungsergebnisse zeigt Sutter, was wir mit mehr Beharrlichkeit im Leben alles erreichen können, welche Faktoren unsere Ausdauerfähigkeit entscheidend beeinflussen und wie wir unsere eigene Ungeduld und die unserer Kinder erfolgreich bändigen können. Denn eines steht fest: Wer sich heute noch in Geduld übt, wird schon morgen davon profitieren.

The financial industry has been struggling with widespread misconduct and public mistrust. Here we argue that the lack of trust into the financial industry may stem from the selection of subjects with little, if any, trustworthiness into the financial industry. We identify the social preferences of business and economics students, and follow up on their first job placements. We find that during college, students who want to start their career in the financial industry are substantially less trustworthy. Most importantly, actual job placements several years later confirm this association. The job market in the financial industry does not screen out less trustworthy subjects. If anything the opposite seems to be the case: Even among students who are highly motivated to work in finance after graduation, those who actually start their career in finance are significantly less trustworthy than those who work elsewhere.

We use a novel method to elicit and measure higher order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) in an experiment with 658 adolescents. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that higher order risk preferences particularly prudence are strongly related to adolescents' field behavior, including their financial decision making, eco-friendly behavior, and health status, including addictive behavior. Most importantly, we show that dropping prudence and temperance from the analysis of students' field behavior would yield largely misleading conclusions about the relation of risk aversion to these domains of field behavior. Thus our paper puts previous work that ignored higher order risk preferences into an encompassing perspective and clarifies which orders of risk preferences can help understand field behavior of adolescents.

We present the results of a randomized intervention in schools to study how teaching financial literacy affects risk and time preferences of adolescents. Following more than 600 adolescents, aged 16 years on average, over about half a year, we provide causal evidence that teaching financial literacy has significant short-term and longer-term effects on risk and time preferences. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects more patient, less present-biased, and slightly more risk-averse. Our finding that the intervention changes economic preferences contributes to a better understanding of why financial literacy has been shown to correlate systematically with financial behavior in previous studies. We argue that the link between financial literacy and field behavior works through economic preferences. In our study, the latter are also related in a meaningful way to students' field behavior.