The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life

by Richard H. Thaler

Richard Thaler challenges the received economic wisdom by revealing many of the paradoxes that abound even in the most painstakingly constructed transactions. He presents literate, challenging, and often funny examples of such anomalies as why the winners at auctions are often the real losers—they pay too much and suffer the "winner's curse"—why gamblers bet on long shots at the end of a losing day, why shoppers will save on one appliance only to pass up the identical savings on another, and why sports fans who wouldn't pay more than $200 for a Super Bowl ticket wouldn't sell one they own for less than $400. He also demonstrates that markets do not always operate with the traplike efficiency we impute to them.

Genres: Economics, Finance, Business, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Buisness

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Richard H. Thaler is an American economist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

He is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he is the director of the Center for Decision Research. He is also the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research and in 2015 was the president of the American Economic Association. He has been published in several prominent journals and is the author of a number of books, including Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting insights in behavioural psychology and it’s influence on economics, even in markets that are very liquid and seen as efficient. I would have liked the current day perspective on the findings.
Would you rather be elegant and precisely wrong or messy and vaguely right?

Loved the event in London yesterday and the energy and wittiness that this Nobel Laureate still brings to the table!
Richard H. Thaler tells about many occurrences of people not being the fable homo economicus. Examples are the counterintuitive notion to bid more conservatively when there are more bidders, as there is more risk of one of the counterparts overbidding and being too optimistic.

Group identity changing outcome of experiments is another example of how small reframing can completely turn things around.

Tit for tat and reciprocal altruism, and exponents to game theory are discussed. Overall research shows people cooperating much more than conceptual freerider problems suggests. Fairness being more important than small financial gains.

Industry impacts on wages being highly stable over time and between countries. Large firms for instance, even after control factors like sector, pay universally more.
Fair wage models, with more profitable firm paying more even after controlling for all factors, potentially being an exponent on a macro scale of the fairness experiments described earlier.

Consume gains as soon as possible seems an adagio but people favouring increasing earnings from loss aversion.
Large bonuses being saved more than smaller ones, which are treated as income and consumed

Market reaction to large cap stocks being more random walk. I imagine a lot of these market inefficiencies like Monday returns being worse and losers of the year mean reverting in January have been arbitraged away by algorithmic trading.

Lot of the literature is quite old, 1980/1990s.

Overall readable but good that an updated 2025 edition is in the works.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disappointing. Thaler discusses economic "anomalies," aka patterns discerned that would not have been predicted by rational economic theory--why different industries pay different wages for the same jobs, why people prefer unrealized gains to paper losses, choices over time that disregard interest and inflation, treating money in savings accounts as more valuable than the same amount in checking accounts, etc. etc.

However, instead of trying to get at the root of why these anomalies exist, Thaler just cites study after study after study after study that usually provide contradictory evidence. Then he closes each chapter with a 1-2 page "commentary" that provides little insight.

I'd skip this book and read Thinking Fast and Slow instead.

[Rachel Childers · Rating 3 out of 5]

A uniquely structured overview of behavioral anomalies in the Economic theory of choice, building on a collection of topic essays from decades ago, by Thaler and collaborators, and updated with modern research findings and evaluations of replicability by Alex Imas (who, full disclosure, is a former work colleague of mine).

Either amazingly or suspiciously, depending, despite recent replication issues in behavioral psychology that have undermined substantial parts of the field, they find (qualitatively) strong replicability, at least for the basic lab experiments that formed the motivation for the phenomena in question, and some wider applicability as expressed in a variety of observational studies. For some basic findings, like failure of exponential discounting for intertemporal choices or von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory over lotteries, this is not so surprising, given the fairly rigid structures imposed by these settings. For some other issues, dealing with more complicated phenomena such as total spending, portfolio choice, or retirement savings, they convincingly rule out the most basic versions of rational theory, but the domains are likely too complicated for a complete assessment of the proposed behavioral alternatives. This is especially the case when many of these alternatives come with free parameters, such as reference points in loss aversion, mental accounting, or the disposition effect which make the theory not fully defined in new applications, to the point where the highly replicable experiment or set of hypothetical scenarios, where these parameters have clear meaning to the experimenter, may be hard to apply in any systematic way to real data. This was driven home when, the same week as I read the chapter on the disposition effect, a finance seminar at my home institution studying portfolio rebalancing led to quite a bit of disagreement as to how such an effect could be implemented in the data and whether it reflected any stable pattern of behavior or artifacts of more complicated rebalancing rules which could be derived without such a behavioral pattern. The key regression of course replicated the sign found in the disposition effect literature, but finance faculty could not agree on any particular interpretation.

Overall, I thought this was a useful review of the primary theories of choice used widely by behavioral economists and the evidence base on which they rely, and am convinced that similar psychological justifications as described therein play an important role, and can be applied in at least some important settings, but I do hope for theories which can be applied without artfulness in more general problems.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Series of chapters on “anomlies” in economic models – such as Winners Curse, Endowment Effect, Co-Operation and Ultimatum games. Each chapter is co-written with another expert and starts with an anecdotal example (often by way of a scenario where you are posed a question by a client/relative about how to act in a situation) lots of summarised published work and a short analysis. A good summary/reference book although the meat of each chapter is more like a dry literature review than any attempt at popular science.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before Nudge, there was The Winner’s Curse.

1. People tend to overbid when there are more bidders; the correct way is to bid lower the more bidders there are. But how to convince them? Read them this book…. Really, that’s what the author wrote…. But will they listen to you? Well, that links to point 2
2. Game theory, prisoners’ dilemma, dividing game; in real life people cooperate. Even if they will never see other people again.
3. Different pay in different industries: mainly because people want to be seen as fair, following historical precedents. Not ability.
4. Betting horse race: bet on the favourites, a few minutes before the end. Don’t bet on the high returns ones.
5. Endowment effect is very real, even to economists.

The later part can get quite technical, but it’s still a great book that ushered in the error of behavioural economics.

[Ami Iida · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's the forerunner of the behavioral economics. it's to unravel human economic irrationally.

[Novem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I didn't fully understand every last technical detail, but it was great to think about the general ideas Thaler covered in each chapter. (My favorite was the chapter on preference reversals, where option A is preferred over option B, but option B is priced more than option A.) His overall message was that there are persistent economic anomalies that challenge certain economic theories, and it's because people are more complicated (or perhaps less rational) than economic models assume.

Every chapter is really well organized: he starts every chapter with an anecdote illustrating the idea, he goes through some actual experiments that have found that people consistently deviate from what economic theory would predict, then he goes through reasons why people may be systematically acting in ways that don't align with theory, and finally he ends with some ideas on how we could refine economic models and what to do with the info. Some of his ending thoughts are fun, like this one:

"The problem seems to be that while economists have gotten increasingly sophisticated and clever, consumers have remained decidedly human. This leaves open the question of whose behavior we are trying to model. Along these lines, at an NBER conference a couple of years ago I explained the difference between my models and Robert Barro's (a well-known rationalist) by saying that he assumes the agents in his model are as smart as he is, while I portray people as being as dumb as I am. Barro agreed with this assessment."

Lots of good food for thought if you don't mind reading stuff that's more on the technical side.

[Firsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Nudge and Misbehaving from the same author, and I gave both the 5-stars. But this, this one was highly uninteresting. Examples have been heard of numerous other times (repeated to oblivion by many other works). I don't think I've learned anything, it was so utterly forgettable, unfortunately. Also this is more of an economics book than a behavioral economics one, or at least the writing is too technical/advanced. I better enjoy reading thedecisionlab, but that's not a book. At first I didn't believe the low rating here, now I understand. To make things worse the narration sounded like he had something in his mouth, this Morey character. Overall: a disappointment.

[Richard Marney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

Summary:

(1) Definition
The Winner's Curse is a phenomenon in auctions and competitive bidding where the winner tends to overpay because they have the most optimistic (or highest) estimate of the item’s true value. It occurs when bidders have imperfect or incomplete information about the value of the item, leading them to bid more than the item is actually worth. The "curse" is that winning the auction often results in a financial loss or lower-than-expected gain.

(2) How it works?
· In a common-value auction (where the item has the same objective value to all bidders, but this value is uncertain—like oil in a tract of land), bidders estimate the value based on available information.
· Each bidder’s estimate includes some error. The bidder with the highest positive error (most optimistic estimate) wins the auction.
· If all bidders are rational and bid based on their estimates, the winner’s estimate is likely to be above the true value, meaning the winning bid exceeds the actual worth.

(3) Simple Example
Imagine an oil lease auction:
· The true amount of oil in a tract is worth $10 million.
· 10 companies estimate the value independently. Their estimates range from $8M to $12M due to imperfect data.
· The company with the highest estimate ($12M) wins the bid—say, at $11.5M.
· The winner then realizes the tract is only worth $10M, incurring a $1.5M loss.

(4) Why It Happens
1. Information asymmetry: No bidder knows the true value.
2. Overconfidence or excessive optimism about the item's value.
3. Competitive pressure to win, leading to aggressive bidding.
4. Failure to account for the fact that winning means you likely had the highest estimate error.

(5) Common Contexts
· Natural resource auctions (oil, minerals)
· Corporate takeovers / PE investing - (acquiring a company at too high a price)
· Spectrum/telecom license auctions
· IPOs when institutional investors overbid
· Real estate in hot markets with multiple offers

(6) Avoiding the Winner’s Curse
Rational bidders can adjust by:
· Bidding more conservatively than their estimated value.
· Accounting for the information that winning conveys (i.e., "If I win, my estimate was probably too high").
· Using auction theory strategies like shading bids in common-value settings.

(7) Simple take-away
In short, the Winner’s Curse is the unintended consequence of winning in an uncertain, competitive environment—a reminder that victory can sometimes come at a cost greater than the prize.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first third to half of this book is must reading for social marketers. Must reading. I was familiar with these concepts from other disciplines and it was refreshing to see economists coming on board.
That noted, this is not a casual read (unless you’re an economist, perhaps). There’s a good deal of jargon in the book - mostly explained - and readers unfamiliar with economics may slow down encountering econospeak - they use the same words we use but differently.
Still, an enjoyable read.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers a lot of food for thought, although sometimes a bit dry. Thaler is better known now as the co-author of Nudge, but back in 1992 he compiled this book reviewing the current (at the time) economic literature regarding consistently reproducible examples of non-rational human behavior. It's not quite a popular economics book, as there are many passages where he simply details the findings of various economics papers, but it's also much more engagingly written than your standard academic treatise.

And the anomalies are for the most part very interesting. I think the ultimatum game is the simplest, most succinct example of the type of irrationality that Thaler is looking at. To give away a small bit of the book, the ultimatum game is a two player game where one offers the other some fraction of a dollar (or $100, $1000, whatever). If the other person agrees they both get their respective fractions, but if the other person refuses then no one gets anything. A mechanically rational second player will take any offer, as it's better than nothing, but that's not what people do in reality, nor do real human first players usually offer the lowest possible amount.

Many of the anomalies run along this line: mechanically rational model predicts one thing, experiments and empirical data predict another, what kind of model of human deviation from rationality would produce such a result? The book is split into several chapters, each of which explores a different anomaly. Some of the chapters are co-authored, and between them and the papers cited, you'll find a lot of famous names in this book, some of whom have grown in fame since this book's publication (to name a few: Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, Brad DeLong, and now-Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and George Akerlof). The chapters I enjoyed the most covered intertemporal choice (people discount the value of having or losing something in the future in inconsistent ways) and status quo bias (people tend to prefer the status quo and will show an irrational preference for maintaining it).

I think this stuff is pretty fascinating. The main drawback of the book is that this fascinating stuff is sometimes presented dryly, at times reading like a laundry list of economic papers. I suppose this was sometimes deliberate because neither he nor the field of economics at large had a good answer to explain the irrationalities being discusses, and so he simply tried to present as much about it as possible. But deliberate or not, the book suffers a bit for these tendencies.

When Thaler breaks out of academician mode and writes "for" the reader he becomes much more enjoyable, but there is a bit of legwork to do when reading this book. If you're willing to do this legwork you'll be rewarded with a nice, if slightly dated (surely there have been many advances since 1992?) survey of economic modeling of human behavior beyond simple rationality.

[Jung]

"The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now" by Richard H. Thaler, written with Alex O. Imas, revisits the ideas that helped overturn traditional economic thinking about human behavior. When Thaler first introduced many of these concepts decades ago, economics largely assumed that people were rational, self-interested optimizers who consistently made decisions to maximize their own benefit. This book challenges that assumption by revisiting a selection of behavioral 'anomalies' that show how real human behavior regularly departs from textbook models. Through examples drawn from experiments, markets, and everyday life, Thaler and Imas demonstrate that judgment is shaped by biases, emotions, framing, and social context. Rather than treating these deviations as random mistakes, the book presents them as systematic patterns that reveal how people actually think and decide.

One of the most striking illustrations of irrational decision-making is the phenomenon known as the winner’s curse. In competitive auctions, people tend to bid cautiously on average, yet the individual who wins often ends up paying more than the item is truly worth. This happens because winning means having the most optimistic estimate among all bidders. The problem becomes worse as competition increases, since a larger group raises the odds that someone has significantly overestimated value. Despite this, bidders frequently grow more aggressive instead of more cautious. Real-world examples abound, from companies that overpay for acquisitions to publishers who offer advances that never earn back their cost. These outcomes contradict the idea that competition automatically produces efficient results. Instead, they show how overconfidence and limited strategic thinking can lead people to mistake winning for success, even when the victory comes at a loss.

The winner’s curse also exposes flaws in the assumption that rational behavior spreads naturally through markets. Economic theory often implies that irrational players will be disciplined or driven out by smarter ones. In reality, people tend to believe they are more sophisticated than their rivals, even when they are making the same predictable errors. This 'one-step-ahead' thinking creates a false sense of control and insight. Auctions, negotiations, and competitive markets therefore become environments where systematic mistakes are repeated rather than corrected, revealing how far actual behavior strays from theoretical ideals.

Another major challenge to traditional economics comes from how people behave when faced with shared resources. Standard theory predicts that individuals will avoid contributing to public goods whenever they can benefit without paying. Yet experiments consistently show that people contribute significant portions of their resources even when interactions are anonymous and one-off. Cooperation appears even when there is no clear future reward for behaving generously. While some explanations rely on indirect self-interest or social norms, none fully account for the persistence and consistency of cooperative behavior. Communication further complicates the picture, as even minimal discussion or promises can dramatically increase cooperation. These findings suggest that people are motivated not only by personal gain, but also by fairness, trust, and a desire to honor commitments, all of which are largely absent from classical economic models.

The book also explores how ownership itself alters perception through the endowment effect. People tend to value objects more once they possess them, even when there is no rational reason for doing so. This creates a gap between how much someone is willing to pay for an item and how much they would demand to sell it. Loss aversion plays a central role, since giving something up feels worse than acquiring it feels good. Alongside this is a strong preference for maintaining the status quo, which leads people to resist change even when it would benefit them. Together, these tendencies explain why individuals hold on to assets they would not choose to buy and why markets can be slower to adjust than theory predicts. The endowment effect reveals that preferences are not fixed or stable, but shaped by reference points and emotional responses to potential losses.

Closely related to this instability are preference reversals, situations in which people contradict themselves depending on how a choice is presented. When asked to choose between options, individuals may favor one alternative, but when asked to assign a monetary value, they may place a higher price on the other. This inconsistency violates a basic requirement of rationality: internal coherence. The explanation lies partly in how different attributes are emphasized by different question formats. People respond more strongly to features that match the way a decision is framed, such as focusing on dollar amounts when asked for prices and probabilities when asked for preferences. These effects show that choices are not simply revealed by asking the right question; they are constructed in the moment, influenced by context and presentation.

The instability of preferences also appears in everyday experiences, such as planning for variety. When imagining future enjoyment, people tend to overestimate how much variety they will want, choosing diverse options that later feel less satisfying than expected. This gap between anticipated and experienced preferences highlights the limits of introspection and prediction. It further undermines the idea that individuals have clear, stable tastes that can be relied upon in economic models.

Perhaps the most unsettling evidence against traditional theory comes from financial markets, long considered the stronghold of rational behavior. The law of one price states that identical assets should trade for identical prices in efficient markets, since any discrepancy would be eliminated by arbitrage. Yet the book presents cases where such violations persisted for long periods. Shares representing the same underlying claims have traded at dramatically different prices, even when there were no obvious barriers preventing investors from exploiting the gap. These examples suggest that psychological factors, institutional constraints, and limits to arbitrage can prevent markets from correcting obvious mispricings. If even simple, mathematically defined relationships fail to hold, confidence in market efficiency becomes much harder to defend.

Taken together, these anomalies reveal a consistent pattern: human decision-making is shaped by context, emotion, and cognitive shortcuts rather than strict optimization. People are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, but instead rely on heuristics that work reasonably well in many situations while leading to predictable errors in others. Rather than dismissing these deviations as noise, "The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now" treats them as essential data for understanding economic behavior. Thaler and Imas argue that acknowledging these patterns leads to a richer, more realistic view of how individuals and markets function. In doing so, the book reinforces the core message of behavioral economics: to understand economic outcomes, we must first understand the imperfect, human minds that produce them.

[Elizabeth]

As heard on The Indicator from Planet Money - Why you overpaid at that online auction

Ever put in the winning bid for something on an auction site only to realize you significantly overpaid? Yeah, there’s a phrase for that. On today’s show: the winner’s curse.

Richard Thaler’s new book with Alex O. Imas is The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now.

Read Planet Money’s newsletter on the winner’s curse. 

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  

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[James Blume · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book where I think enjoyment will be split by whether you’re an economist or a normal person reading it for fun. For economist, the book is fantastic. Each chapter reopens a topic from the core PhD class sequence and discusses the last fifty years of behavior research on it. It does a great job both being an easy read, and really strongly pushing back on the classical, non-behavioral economics.

For non-economists, I fear the book might be a bit in the weeds. It spends a lot of time of arguing with ideas that may seem downright silly to everyone without background in PhD level economics. (We believe lots of silly stuff to make models tractable!! I.E. preference rationality, independence axiom, and lifetime models…etc). For those unfamiliar with modern economics or its adjacent fields, it’s hard to overstate how important these ideas are for modern economic thought and research.

A lot of modern economists view on behavioral economics can be summarized by something a fourth year PhD at MIT told me when she explained why she has moved away from behavioral models in her research on banking “While I believe behavioral economics and that these anomalies are real, I think a lot more of the world can be understand by viewing people as rational than can be explained by people being dumb.”

The Winners Curse makes the very compelling argument that there are cases where behavior is a first-order problem and can only be ignored as your own peril.

For people looking for a book like Nudge where policy implications are front and center, you may be disappointed. (Check out Cass Sunstein recent work!). However, if you want to read a humorous and thoughtful reflection of 50 years of behavioral research this is your book.

[Terry Koressel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Winner's Curse is written by Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize winner who understands the paradoxes and anomalies of economic assumptions as well as anyone. There are certain economic principles or theories or transactions whose empirical results do not match the accepted "laws". The cause of these anomalies is patterned human behavior which differs from predicted or theorized behavior. The Winner's Curse is brilliantly researched, organized and detailed. So why only 3 stars? The book is dry....very hard to get through unless you are a serious student of economics and behavioral finance (which I am not). The book is written in the style of a college textbook. I don't want to criticize the book just because it did not suit my style (or possibly intellect). I learned a great deal from The Winner's Curse. Sincere kudos to Mr. Thaler and his deserved Nobel Prize. I am only saying that a more engaging writing style would have improved my enjoyment of the book. I recommend The Winner's Curse highly with a cautionary note about the writing style.

[Jacob Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't expect a popular science book in the style of "Thinking Fast and Slow" or Thaler's "Nudge" or "Misbehaving". "The Winner's Curse" is, if my understanding is correct, a collection of columns that Thaler wrote in academic journals and that have been edited for a non-expert public. While I can certainly appreciate that Thaler's columns formed the basis of what we now call behavioural economics (he even alludes to "a new science" in the introduction, one that is no built on the assumption of rationality), and that therefore the columns were front-running organized theory, this grouping of writings is at times all over the place and lacks coherence. Some of the observations are also superficial: Thaler explores phenomenons but devotes relatively little to theorizing why they occur. I'd suggest reading if you are already familiar with the core concepts of behavioural economics, as an historical artifact to see how the discipline evolved. But it's certainly not a book for novices.

[Reza · Rating 3 out of 5]

From one of the founders (or the founder?) of the behavioral economy, the book presents examples of where traditional economic theories fail to describe inefficiencies in decision making. Not every case ends with a definite explanation using behavioral methods. Some of the chapters are practical like "winner's curse" for those in business, "Savings, Fungibility, and Mental Accounts" for all of us making savings and borrowing decisions, and "Pari-mutuel Betting Markets" for the horse racing and betting kind... It is a collection of research papers written over time - so it is more academic in nature than I expected. Some chapters are easier than others to follow for non-technical folks like myself. The final chapter went way over my head - with discussion of foreign exchange rates and explanations of inefficiencies.

[William Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard the authors of this book on a podcast I regularly listen to, and when I heard the older author had worked with Daniel Kahneman I decided to preorder their book. I was very excited to get it and begin in, as I LOVED “Thinking Fast and Slow”. It remains one of my favorite psychology books overall, and by far my favorite behavioral economics book.
This book was good. I was disappointed because it seemed very technical about economics, something I haven’t spent much time learning or studying. There were definitely some interesting “anomalies” regarding the theories economists have and how people generally don’t behave like we’d expect (and actually quite irrationally). But overall I was much less into it as I hoped, again because it was heavy on economics.

[Neil Saltmarsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have rated this lower than because many of the aspects in this book are known through other works and I have read a lot of them. It had a more investing bent with equations which this reader does not have the knowledge to understand but I understood the main points as described. I think behavioural finance so better describes the markets than traditional economic theory because of the blind spots occurring in the "rational" man. Maybe women are more rational. Research would suggest that is the case. Good enough read, a little more detail to FX but apart from that, very little I hadn't read before in other literature.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book all about paradoxes on how we think about possessions and money. We are not always the perfectly rational beings that classical economic theory depends on. For example, you win $500 in some contest, you probably splurge and spend some of it on something fun. You gain $500 on some stock you own, you don't think about selling the stock and having a party. In both cases $500 was gained, but you mentally classify the money differently. The book is sometimes slow going, as the author carefully presents the relevant research to date; I skimmed these parts (though appreciate that the citations are thorough). A worthwhile read, it brings up many ideas about how we all think.

[LaanSiBB]

Four proofs to argue classical economics:

1. Bitting for an unreasonable price
2. Overestimated judgement on market value
3. Emotional response for unfair situations
4. Sequences of monetary evaluation for different outcome

All reflected rationality is not the case in economic assumptions. Yet, it might be more interesting not to re-frame economic studies, but providing a solid ground for empirical assumptions. What classical economic can't do is crossing fields of studies in the past, but now we can redefine pragmaticism through neuro-sociology.

[Paul Keough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!

My only caution is that I do think Thaler went too much into the history though? I mean come on talking about studies from the 1980s when it’s 2018 when he wrote the book. Aren’t there any studies that are more recent?

Having said that, the last quarter of the book was really great for me as a financial advisor because Dr. Thaler explained how to apply the principle of winners curse to investing for families and businesses in a practical way.

I highly recommend this for financial advisors!

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more of a text book. If you don't have an economical background some parts will be a little complicated to understand. It is a summary of papers he published in an economics journal. The last part of the book is lighter and you can digest more. Talks about social marketing and how the anomalies (some of them not valid now) interacts with the way we think. It is a book that is getting older but still a good one to understand behavioural economics.

[Jack Caress · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. Thaler was my first and most notable mentor into Behavioral Finance and Economics. The book is a refresher from what he wrote 25+ years ago. I enjoyed it and revisiting some of the areas of discussion and how the research has progressed was worth the read.

It served to reinforce the anomalies and reinforce that there are still problems with separating studies done by academics versus real world behavior.

[Andreas Riedl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Thaler's thinking. Nevertheless, the book is approx. 25 years old and concepts were further developed. Also, this is an economics textbook that probably requires a certain education in the field to be able to read it. Milestone book.

[Bernardo Sacchini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but dense reading

Good book but it is somewhat dense for an interested reader that’s not an economist. I think there are better Thaler books out there that provide similar learning

[Chris M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book was very interesting. The authors analyzed the impact of behavioral economic anomalies from the 1980s in order to see if such findings hold up today.

The book covers a lot of common concepts in behavioral economics, which attempts to explore how our emotions influence our decision making. Economic theories are logical and rational, but people are not.

If you read a lot of books about behavioral economics or business psychology, you likely won’t learn much in the way of new information here. Also, the description of the experiments was not interesting at all, so if you’re prone to boredom, you will struggle with this book.

Objectively, it’s still a good book. Some of the better sections were the ones that discussed the endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion. Loss aversion is something that impacts individuals and organizations alike.

[Sharath Reddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me at least, largely things I understood. The book explains why traditional economics doesn’t truly work. Traditional economics makes fundamental assumptions that don’t match how real people act. It can be useful at a high level. However, following its policy implications can create damage.

[Wodin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information, just not as well put together as Thaler's later books or Thinking, Fast and Slow

[DJ Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting topics, but often really dry and dull writing--Misbehaving is a much better book by the same author on largely the same subjects.