Predictably Irrational

In this book, the author tries to help you reshape the concept of what makes you and the people around you make the choices. Describing several experiments, the phenomenon of people making the same mistakes time and again in predictable ways is explored, such as buying warranties they do not need, succumbing to peer pressure, and spending more money on expensive indulgences than they budget for. So the main underlying idea throughout the book is that people behave irrationally, but in a predictable manner.

Each of the chapters of the book focuses on one particular irrational way in which people make decisions, describing the experiments that Ariely and his colleagues constructed and carried out to demonstrate the predictability of this behavior. For example, in the first chapter, the author describes how his test subjects could be driven to prefer product A over product B if they were given the choice between A, B, and a similar but inferior version of product A instead of a choice between just A and B. In another chapter on the mysterious power of “free” products, he describes how test subjects who preferred Lindt chocolates to Hershey’s Kisses by roughly 3-to-1 when they were priced at 15 cents and 1 cent respectively, changed their preferences to 1-to-2 when each was discounted by 1 cent. In other words, when priced at 14 cents and 0 cents respectively, people disproportionately changed their preference to the free Hershey’s Kiss, disregarding their preference and the fact that the cost difference in each case—14 cents—is exactly the same. These results lead Ariely to suggest that “free” is a price that causes people to behave irrationally.

The “one main lesson from the research described in this book,” Ariely informs us, “is that we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend”. Although we may think we are in control of how we make market calculations and economic decisions, he argues, we are actually driven by perceptual reactions, ingrained habits, and “decision illusions” (such as the mysterious power of “free” products) much more than we realize.

The Spirit Level

This virtuous book describes in a very convincing manner that economic equality is good for society. It exposes the falsity of the belief that massive inequalities are a necessary condition for improving the quality of life in contemporary developed societies.

The authors argue that very skewed distributions of income influence in the rise of a large range of social anomalies, with the result that everyone suffers. Inequality in their view is not just bad for the poor, it’s also bad for the rich. Analyzing data from many developed countries it is observed a close relation between the level of inequality in each country (or state) and a range of outcomes: levels of trust, mental illness, life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, children’s educational performance, number of teenage births, murders, imprisonment rates and social mobility. The higher inequality is, the lower is the trust, the more the mental illnesses are present, the higher are the murder rates and so on.

The main theme in the book is that rather than securing further economic growth, inequality is now the big challenge facing developed societies: for the vast majority of people in affluent countries the difficulties of life are no longer about filling our stomachs, having clear water and keeping warm. Most of us now wish we could eat less rather than more. And, for the first time in history, the poor are generally fatter than the rich.”

The book has many virtues, the chief of which is to provide a mass of empirical evidence that societies with greater equality of income almost always do better than societies with more inequality, on a wide range of indicators.

Made to stick

The book made to stick is written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. This book suggests empoying the stck approaches in order to create ideas that are sticky  and long lasting. The expains in detail 6 charachteristics of sticky ideas.

• Simple - find the core of any idea. This permits the message to be conveyed and reach the maximum of the target focus group. This because simplification makes the clarification of complexity and consequently makes it easily understood for an unlimited number of people. Once the information arrives to the reader, he should also understand the message conveyed.
• Unexpected — grab people's attention by surprising them.
• Concrete — make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later.
• Credible — give idea believability.
• Emotional — help people see the importance of an idea. His speech was a personal one, it was not formal justification to protect him from the bad results, and people could feel it.
• Stories — empower people to use an idea through narrative.

All these elements appropriately used, help ideas to be sticky.

The Meatball Sundae

The Meatball Sundae

The author Seth Godin in the Meatball Sundae book talks about the importance of new internet (Social Network) marketing strategies and how these tactics should be applied to a modern,and also growing business model.
The book, however talks at of the new rules of marketing and the fourteen trends that are shaping the way products and ideas are communicated and sold:
• Direct communication and commerce between producers and consumers
• Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
• The need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
• Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
• The Long Tail
• Outsourcing
• Google and the dicing of everything
• Infinite channels of communication
• Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
• The shifts in scarcity and abundance
• The triumph of big ideas
• The shift from “how many” to “who”
• The wealthy are like us
The author in the book talks also about the importance of that social media have the power to amplify word of mouth like never before, and that a product or idea is only going to spread in social networks is if it is truly remarkable (a Purple Cow). Press releases of boring products will never show up.

Elton Dushku

PREDICTABLE IRRATIONAL

This book indicate us what is the effect while decision making and behavioral economics are manipulated by a hidden hand. As far as these two elements are closely related with the needs of people some smarter guys will play with them in order to realize their own ambitions. In order to do this, they shape a framework, create some spaces to leave people understand they are free to choose in a rational way. By other words:

When politics for its own interests will to manipulate the people organize a scenario and appeal them for keeping their eyes opened and oppose democratically or violently as it is the rational way to get rid of without taking into consideration the result of loosing the crowd's control.

In January 21 of 2011, as a response to a corruption affair tape were the Head of Integration Socialist Movement was included, the Head of Socialist party Edi Rama found an opportunity to act and decided to organize a big demonstration. As a result the crowd was left deliberately to get out of the control and the result of this was four innocent dead people. Here I dont want to show who burden the fault of this crime. I want to show why Edi Rama didnt react when taxes rose up, when retirement age was increased from 60 to 65? etc. So concluding ...people must act based on the force of rationality, not with the rational force.

Book 5: Billions of Entrepreneurs

This book analysis the characteristics of two big countries CHINA and INDIA, their potentials in the world economy And a possible collaboration of this two powers that will result into a new world power that will rule all the world. This two countries are havin almost 40% of all world population and a good managing to this two countries strengths will result to an unstoppable power that will grow and grow until infinity. As we may see also in nowadays everything is produced in China, all the technology innovation comes from India, so these two countries have strong position and today in the world but a collaboration of these two may get them faster and safer at the top of the world

Book 4: Predictable Irrational

The main idea of the book is talking about understanding people behavior in some specific situation. In all the time we think that we are making rational choices, but in most of the time without understanding it we are making irrational choices. It happens to all of us that we are changing our perception in fee seconds. It is well known the Chinas products, that all of us say that they are of low quality, and nowadays we buy IPhones that are smart phones of the highest prices that are assembled in china. I think also that all this big marketing world makes all of us do so many irrational choices, they blind us with all their strategies and at the end we are just victims of our irrational choices