A fair amount of traffic coming to my blog is through searches for ‘studying behavioural economics online’. So if that’s why you’re visiting, have a look at Dan Ariely’s free online course through Coursera which started again earlier this week. I did the original course last year and can recommend it as a great introduction to what is a really interesting (and increasingly high-profile, especially in business) school of thought on how we make decisions and how context influences us, in ways which we might not realise, but which are often quite predictable. And it’s free (an area he discusses in the course – why is anything ‘free’ so appealing?) – what more could you ask for?

On a related note, I’ll be co-running the MRS’s consumer psychology course next Friday too; my colleague runs the morning session where we look at the roots of psychology and cover some of the key schools of thought, while I run the afternoon session where the focus is modern thinking including behavioural economics and how market research is responding. It’s a nice introduction into this area so if you’re interested in finding out more about it, come and join us!