Ch. 3: Open thread

[Aaron Swartz]

I liked this chapter. Not too much math. I found the variations on the
game experiments particularly fascinating.

Discussed in this chapter: sharecropping, late fees, reciprocity,
altruism, endogenous preferences, behavioral economics, risk and
uncertainty, utility functions, expected utility, von
Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, Bayesian updating, endowment effect,
hyperbolic discounting (and the resulting preference reversal),
prospect theory, framing, reflection effect, social preferences
(other-regarding and process-regarding), ultimatum games, heterogenous
behavior

PLUS THIS WEEK'S BONUS BOOK: This chapter reminds me of the (much
easier to read) book _Explaining Social Behavior_ by Jon Elster.[1]
Elster's discussion of, e.g., hyperbolic discounting is much clearer
and more detailed if you're curious for some reason. Elster shows how
hyperbolic discounting can be used to explain things like eating too
many chips and feeling bad about it and then deciding to throw the
rest of your bags of chips away so that you don't do that again.

[1]: http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/Politics_Sociology/Jon30Sciences.html