A Duke University behavioral economics course taught by Dan Ariely on Coursera, covering how people deviate from rational decision-making and how that plays out in markets, policy, and everyday choices.

Commenters call it one of the best Coursera courses, praising its high-quality videos and graduate-level readings.

What commenters said (7)

1. Strongly recommendsSriVee2018in “Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?”

   https://www.coursera.org/instructor/danariely One of the best courses I enjoyed. Have become a fan of Prof Dan. Have read his books on Irrationality and thoroughly enjoyed.

2. Strongly recommendsMaggiD2014in “Ask HN: best courses free or otherwise ”

   This is considered to be one of the best courses on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

3. RecommendsDowwie2018in “Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?”

   Dan Ariely's behavior economics mooc (from Duke, through Coursera) was more of a graduate level calibre in terms of required/recommended readings and the videos were of high quality.

   There was a gamification mooc taught by Kevin Webach (Wharton) that was excellent, too.

   Chuck Eesley's first tech-entrepreneur mooc was ground breaking (it led to the spinoff of NovoEd).

   The last mooc I actually completed was one for contract law, offered by harvardx. It gives a nice, high-level overview of the subject-- good enough for my needs/interests.

4. Recommendsjordn2014in “Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job”

   The first (and stated) effect of this policy is to weed out the unmotivated employees.

   However, Dan Ariely has explained that the secondary effect is potentially more powerful. For those that choose to stay, they will forever live with their past action of having turned down lots of money to work there. So, when they're having a crappy day and hating their job, they're probably thinking "why didn't I take the money and quit?!". The only way to reconcile their thoughts and actions is to explain that, in fact, they must really love this job and therefore should work hard at it. This effect is known as ‘Cognitive Dissonance’[1] and is fascinating.

   Here's a link to a video of Dan explaining this[2] and a really excellent Coursera course he does on Irrational behaviour[3].

   [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

   [2] http://bigthink.com/videos/dan-ariely-zappos-and-the-offer

   [3] https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

5. Recommendsalex_c2013in “Applying Dan Ariely's TED talk to software development”

   He also has an excellent course on Coursera on this subject:

   https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

6. Mentionsazangru2021in “Coursera S-1 IPO”

   Subsequent visits have been less positive as the site tried to monetize..

   Yeah, I remember Dan Ariely's course on behavioral economics, and — my favorite — Yuval Harari's course on the human history from the early, pre-paid-certificate days of Coursera. That was fun! I have a feeling that as the site became more commercial it has also become less fun.

7. Mentionszsstor2013in “Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People”

   Cable providers have been the worst with this in my experience. No matter what you do it takes an ungodly amount of time to cancel service.

   There was a great Behavioral Economics course on Coursera taught by Dan Ariely that touched on methods like these, as well as subtler ones. I think the slide on Organ Donation was from him. https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-001/class

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