This course introduces the field of behavioral science, the study of how people make decisions. The course is highly interdisciplinary -- we discuss insights and methodologies from behavioral economics to neuroscience. The goal is to understand what leads individuals -- and groups -- to make suboptimal decisions, and how we might debias our decision processes to improve decision outcomes.

This course is intended for practitioners with some prior knowledge of investing. The course introduces the most pertinent ideas from the behavioral finance and broader behavioral science literature. I cover common biases which lead to suboptimal investment decisions, as well as best practices for debiasing decision making. We will discuss various applications to asset management, and to financial decision making more broadly.

This course introduces our PhD students to the basics of the experimental method in the social sciences. I cover best practices for experimental design and introduce a number of classic experimental paradigms, pulling from behavioral economics, behavioral finance, and marketing. Students will discuss how they would design and run an experiment online, in the lab, or in the field to test a hypothesis.