Noisy Decisions

What does it mean if you say that something is an epidemic? In the case of a virus, it usually means that it is spreading rapidly and that more and more people are getting infected. When a disease isn’t on the rise but is there in a population at a reasonably steady level, we ten ...  Show more

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. On the programme:Last week, Annunziata Rees-Mogg took to X to post a claim about the proportion of sex offences in Dorset that are committed by asylum seekers, writing that “asylum seekers make up 0.8% of Dorset’s populati ...  Show more

Our book this month is called “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement” by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. Daniel Kahneman is an author, psychologist and economist notable for his work on hedonic psychology, psychology of judgment and decision-making. He is also k ...

The Nobel prize-winning economist and professor of psychology Daniel Kahneman focuses his latest research on the high cost of inconsistent decision making. In Noise, co-authored with Oliver Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, he looks at why humans can be so unreliable, and what can be d ...  Show more

Much of the appeal of McDonald’s comes from the chain’s consistency. A cheeseburger in the US or a McSpicy Chicken in India should taste the same every time. But what if a business had wildly different outcomes depending on which leader was making decisions? Renowned psychologist ...  Show more

 Our book this month is called “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman is a professor of experimental psychology at Princeton University. He is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics for his life work in psychology and how decisions are made that in ...