My book of the year the father of behavioural economics makes a pugnacious case that humans do not behave as the economics textbooks say Tim Harford, FT

Nobel Prize-winner and co-author of Nudge, Richard Thaler, and star economist Alex Imas explore behavioral economics in this fully updated edition of the seminal work The Winner s Curse

Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no incentive to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed?

Over thirty years ago, Richard Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then. Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex Imas to write a new book. Every chapter starts with an original