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We make thousands of decisions every day. Do I cross the road now, or wait for the oncoming truck to pass? Should I eat fries or a salad for lunch? How much should I tip the cab driver? We usually make these decisions with almost no thought, using what psychologists call “heuristics” – rules of thumb that enable us to navigate our lives. Without these mental shortcuts, we would be paralyzed by the multitude of daily choices. But in certain circ*mstances, these shortcuts lead to predictable errors – predictable, that is, if we know what to watch out for. Did you know, for example, that we are naturally biased towards selling investments that are doing well for us, but holding on to those that are doing poorly? Or that we often select sub-optimal insurance payment plans, and routinely purchase insurance that we don’t even need? And why do so many of us fail to enroll in our employer’s corporate retirement plans, even when the employer offers to match our contributions?Behavioral finance is the study of these and dozens of other financial decision-making errors that can be avoided, if we are familiar with the biases that cause them. In this course, we examine these predictable errors, and discover where we are most susceptible to them. This course is intended to guide participants towards better financial choices. Learn how to improve your spending, saving, and investing decisions for the future.
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What people are saying
According to other learners, here's what you need to know
behavioral finance in 25 reviews
It was a good introductory course on behavioral finance.
I am new to this coursera and i took my first course as Behavioral Finance.I learnt many things in it.I came to know various knowledge about Behavioral Finance.
It was an awesome experience and the course was really informative and has helped me in understanding the concepts of Behavioral Finance.
My first foray into behavioral finance and I am very interested and ready now to dig deeper into the subject.
it is a brill course which is interesting and full of magic Overall, it summaries all the concepts you need in behavioral finance.
Very useful especially as an introduction to Behavioral Finance.
it helped me to built up my basic knowledge of behavioral finance through very effective and attractive movies and interesting reading stuffs as well as testing which I had to review my notes and research to think it over.
This is a great starter course/primer for behavioral finance!
I would like to thank Dr Rasiel for the contents of this course.Recommendations for improvement:-Create a single sheet defining the biases contained in the course for easy reference.-Add more examples and retrospectives that explain the similarities and differences between the biases.Overall, I really enjoyed the course and look forward to additional courses on Behavioral Finance.
I think this course is great as an introduction to behavioral finance, however I think the content lacks depth and is rather superficial.
The subject matter is good, but the course does not adequately explain behavioral finance concepts.
I love the idea of behavioral Finance.
Great introduction to behavioral finance!
Great, synthesised knowledge from various fields: behavioral finance, psychology, markets, trading and history.
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recommend this course in 7 reviews
I would recommend this course to my friends as well.
Recommend this course for any investment professional or amateur to learn about the most common pitfalls in investing The course is insightful, very easy to understand which helps in understanding the concepts.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend this course.
I definitely would not recommend this course.
I really like the material and I plan on taking another class on Behavioral Finance, though I can not recommend this course as a the best option.
The last quiz seemed to have some material that was not covered in the course, and there was little to no feedback for the answers.Overall, I would recommend this course to a friend on the condition that more feedback be given for the quizzes.
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decision making in 8 reviews
One will get to know about many hidden biases, which play a crucial role in their decision making.
As a long time investor, I found this course is very helpful to get to learn how psychology affects our decision making everyday.
Highly recommend to anyone to can accept the fact the behavior and biases play a major role in our financial decision making process.
Will help create a strong platform for the human decision making bias and behavioral aspects on decision making.
The course covers the basic foundations of behavioral finance, especially prospect theory and various cognitive biases that negatively influence our decision making in financial affairs.
Very useful not only to money matters, but for life in general and decision making.
Interesting examples were chosen to help us understand the cognitive biases that include decision making, and the lecture slides were very helpful.
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video lectures in 7 reviews
Video Lectures covered partial course content.
我觉得把多一些阅读材料的知识点放进视频会更好！ Very interesting topic and great instructors.Unfortunately, many things were not covered by video lectures.
For a valuable Coursera course I am expecting that most of the material is covered with video lectures (otherwise I read a book on that matter) and I am expecting thought-through slides with clear definitions, clear practical examples and exercises, and the presentation of experimental proofs for the given statements.
More importantly, only a very limited subset of the course is covered with the suitable and valuable video lectures.Especially the last of the three-week course consist mostly of reading material from an external website.The exercises after each of the three weeks are at the lower end of what I have seen on Coursera and the lecturers should consider putting more effort in creating useful questions for formative and summative evaluations of the learning progress.In summary, smart lecturers present a very interesting and highly relevant topic, but they put to little effort in creating a compellingly online course.
The video lectures are not adequate, too much self-study effort is needed to have a good understanding of the subject.
Good Course too much to learn, but should have included a little more video lectures along with the readings.
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so much in 7 reviews
Muito útil Interesting course, nevertheless, many concepts find very useful definition, only as the replies to the quizz.Same thing for the last quizz which explains the different biases during "bubbles", but do not give advices on how to bypass them Generally it's a fantastic online course, which gives me so much insight to an area I have previously unaware of.
Thank you so much!
It's challenging enough to keep you interested but not so much so as to make you feel out of depth and despaired.
Thank Coursera so much.
This is even worse because for many questions, I wasn't 100% sure about the answer and was doubting between multiple answers (for both those where I answered right and wrong).The material as such is very interesting but it could have been so much better.
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duke university in 6 reviews
Basic introduction to Behavioral Finance - mostly application of terms on exams that did not tie to lect Really good course Great content It is a very valuable course and i am glad to be a part of it, this is something that you can confidently call accomplishment, thank you duke university:) Very very challenging!!
I Thank the faculty of the Duke University as well as the Coursera team for offering this course.
I give full rating to this course - Duke University through coursera!!
I expected better quality from a course provided through Duke University.
Thanks to Duke University and to its Professors for this opportunity!
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rather than in 6 reviews
Ones that can be used to make money by understanding the market's behavioral biases, rather than simply avoiding mistakes in personal investing by knowing one's own behavioral biases.
Moreover, the quizzes predominantly ask "what is this called" rather than "how does this work".
I would have liked this course to be longer, so that the information could have been spread out among more lectures, rather than so much information condensed into one week.
Only preferred change would be more videos rather than readings but otherwise phenomenal course.
I find it is more about learning concepts and identifying them, rather than applying them.
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financial decisions in 5 reviews
Interesting -supported by theory- insight on how financial decisions are made and in which false assumptions/predictions decision makers ¨fall¨.
Altough I expected a course more oriented into financial decisions on how to learn to avoid financial bias and make better decisions I still learned a lot.
I feel better equipped to make financial decisions and I will be able to ask smarter questions from my investment advisors.
in addition, this course came just in time to help better evaluate current projects at work (financial institution) This course was very insightful in terms of giving the students the ability to deeply examine the underlying causes of humans' economic and financial decisions.
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little bit in 5 reviews
Just the quiz is a little bit hard and a lot of stuff is not mentioning in the videos and materials.
However, I think the test questions are sometimes a little bit difficult, and test2 and test3 should have answers and analysis like test1.
A little bit hard to keep up pay attention to the video lectures.
Thank you for the course!Lots of good things, though I would have preferred a deeper dive into the biases, the root causes, manifestations and generally a little bit more detailed perspective.
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