Rephrasy vs StealthGPT

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?

Throughout history, people have behaved in ways that defy conventional economic thinking. They make emotional and illogical decisions about their finances, cling to investments that are failing (fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy), and choose immediate gratification over financial stability.

Conventional economic theory paints a picture of a world without friction, in which supply and demand are governed by logical optimizers. But I’ve seen first-hand how far reality strays from theory’s predictions, and this discrepancy is what first attracted me to the field of behavioral economics.

My undergraduate studies in economics provided me with a solid grounding in quantitative modeling, but I was left wanting a deeper understanding of the motivations and decision-making processes of the humans represented by the numbers. Then I came across Richard Thaler’s notion of “mental accounting,” and suddenly disparate concepts came together, and it made sense why people spend tax refunds differently than their paychecks, for example. Instead of simply accepting the Homo economicus assumption, I wanted to delve deeper to better understand the psychology of individual behavior, because in order to devise more efficient economies, we need to understand how people actually behave, not just how we think they should behave.

I am particularly interested in choice architecture and its potential applications in the public policy space. There are a host of applications for “nudges” that can have a dramatic effect on society, increasing retirement savings and encouraging more sustainable energy consumption, for example. Behavioral economics is a field that can truly democratize economics by contextualizing it with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and neuroscience.

Rather than studying economics with an arm’s-length understanding of the market, I hope to investigate the psychological forces that give rise to it. With a graduate degree in behavioral economics, I could learn to apply an interdisciplinary understanding of human behavior to the design of policies, systems, and products. Your emphasis on experimental economics and empirical field research would provide me with an opportunity to investigate the impact of cognitive biases on topics such as financial inclusion and wealth inequality.