Understanding Behavioral Finance: Challenging the Foundations of Economic Models

The lecturer introduces the course and welcomes the students.

The lecturer discusses the format of the course and the importance of weekly readings.

The lecturer announces a guest lecture by a professional in the industry.

⭐️ The video discusses the importance of completing coursework continuously rather than leaving it for the last week, in order to learn effectively.

💯 The essay in this course focuses on understanding the behavior of the finance sector in the economy and the causes of financial crises.

📚 The lecturer encourages students to think outside the textbook and be experimental in their essay by considering different models and opinions on the relationship between credit money and fiat money, and whether the government can fix the global financial crisis.

🧠 The speaker challenges traditional economic theory and argues for a non-mainstream approach.

👥 The University of Western Sydney has a diverse department with both Orthodox and non-Orthodox thinkers.

📚 The speaker mentions various resources such as a blog, YouTube channel, and software package available for learning and research.

💡 The main focus is on understanding the transition from stability to the economic crisis, and the role of private debt.

📚 In microeconomics, consumers maximize utility subject to a budget constraint and firms maximize profits subject to demand.

💡 In finance, investors maximize returns subject to opportunities and markets reflect anticipated future cash flows.

🤔 Economists analyze actual behavior and find that the majority of people behave irrationally, questioning the definition of rationality.

🍌 People prefer bananas over biscuits due to higher satisfaction.

🔍 Invisible fairies theory criticized, revealed preference theory proposed as a solution.

💰 Deriving individual's demand curve based on price and satisfaction.

⬇️ Explanation of Giffen goods and the income effect.

🔑 The lecture discusses the theory of a single consumer and the process of deriving a market demand curve.

📚 The video emphasizes the importance of testing economic behavior based on actual choices and preferences.

🔬 The German academic, Sippel, conducted a careful experimental design to test the weak and strong axioms of revealed preference.

💡 Rational behavior in economics implies choosing the combination of goods that maximizes utility.

📊 An experiment with college students revealed that a majority of them made irrational choices, raising doubts about the universality of the maximizing principle.

🔍 The measure of waste of income was used to assess the seriousness of the violations and showed a significant drop when a weighting of 0.95 was applied.