Clever AI Humanizer vs Rephrasy

Throughout my undergraduate degree in Economics, I struggled with the Homo economicus assumption.Whilst I understood the utility of quantitative models and how accurate they can be at predicting behaviours, the lack of a human element made the numbers feel empty. My eureka moment was learning about Richard Thaler’s theory of mental accounting. Suddenly financial behaviours that previously seemed very abstract made sense. For example understanding why tax refunds are treated differently to income. I realised that in order to create solutions to economic inefficiencies we need to understand how people actually behave.

I became fascinated by how choice architecture can be used within public policy. I became very interested in how small changes, or nudges, could have huge positive impacts on society. behavioural economics is a really useful way of making economics accessible to everyone. Using psychology, neuroscience and sociology, behavioural economics brings the human element back into data.

At your institution I would like to apply my research to real world policy. I am very interested in your experimental economics focus and fieldwork. I would love to investigate how cognitive biases affect wealth inequality.

I do not wish to study economics to simply understand how markets work from an outside perspective. I want to understand the psychology behind them. By gaining a graduate degree in behavioural economics I will gain the interdisciplinary skills needed to create policies, products and systems that work with human nature.

For years, I thought that I wanted to go into economics, because economics attempts to answer questions about human decisions. Then I realized that it wasn't really about human decisions, it was all about the phenomenon of supply and demand. Supply and demand are really helpful to understand how markets work, but they can't really answer questions about why humans decide anything at all. Yet, the study of economics is so pervasive and successful, that I wondered if there could be a way to incorporate "how we make decisions" into a system.

In my undergraduate studies, I delved into the burgeoning literature around decision theory, the psychology of how people view risk and reward, and the simple mathematical models that ascribe numbers to the former and the latter. Then I encountered actual people, who proved to be stubborn and messy, consistently making decisions that did not adhere to the models. Rather than assuming people are rational and that they only need more and better information, I found the best way to understand people's decisions is to put them under the microscope.

That curiosity brought me into the world of behavioral economics, where economics and psychology meet in a quest to understand and explain human behaviors that, at first glance, seem strange and irrational. Such subtle nudges affect how we save for the future, spend our money, and make choices in our day-to-day life. Behavioral economics brings about a new theoretical model of how people behave.

Behavioral economics appeals to me because it steps beyond the imaginary blue box of traditional economics. I hope to study human behavior because each individual is more than a statistic, existing in a complex web of cultural and social realities that traditional economics neglects.

A graduate degree, I believe, will train me to measure and predict behaviors and then translate my research into solutions. That lets me respond to fundamental questions: In which contexts do these behaviors arise?