Scarcity Bias

No, I am not referring to that 1998 action movie with Tia Carrere.  More to situations where you spend a month researching the best flat screen TV, then invested twice as much money in a penny stock based solely on a hot…

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Anchoring Bias

This is clinging to a fact or figure that should have no bearing on your decision.  Often, we use an initial value or first piece of informationa as a “starting point” in decision making.  Even if the initial value was…

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Decision Heuristics

Or why we adhere so strongly to our beliefs.   One culprit is what the rule of consistency describes: a powerful force that compels us to act in a way that is consistent with our past behavior (this rule is extensively…

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Overconfidence

A close relative to the previously mentioned Confirmation Bias, Overconfidence is the tendency to overestimate our own abilities (i.e., we aren’t as smart as we think we are).  We tend to think that we are much better forecasters and estimators than we…

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