So I cheated, sorta. I watched Ariely's lecture on TED and then read a bunch of his academic papers before picking up this book. However, I still enjoyed reading it even though the book doesn't break a bunch of different ground. I liked the fact that Ariely uses experiments to help quantify various quirks of human behavior. Yeah, the power of free is well known, but it's interesting to hear him describe the experiments and their results. Some of his other findings were a bit more surprising and interesting. The ethics stuff is a bit disturbing. The corporate theft is a topic that's well known to me (I've spent a fair bit of time living on corporate expense reports, and that's a slippery slope, definitely).

The thing I really enjoyed was the fact that Ariely likes to talk about how flawed the human intellect is. I love it. In my experience working in industry, I've been amazed at how managers claim they want to make rational, logical decisions then shoot from the hip or use numbers to rationalize their gut instincts. Maybe I like this book because I went to MIT and I like the fact that he used MIT students as guinea pigs. I dunno. Smart people really aren't as smart as they think they are.

This is a fun book, not super in-depth or complicated, but a nice basic introduction to behavioral economics.

One caveat: if you are a hardcore libertarian or free markets person, the author's politics might turn you off. Try to take it with a grain of salt. The politics aren't as important as the experiments and the findings. Enjoy!