Teaching
The Behavioral Science of Money
MGT 111. An undergraduate course at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego, taught in the winter quarter.
Why do smart people make bad financial decisions? This course is about the psychology of money: how people actually spend, save, borrow and invest, where their intuitions go wrong, and what can be done about it. Students work with real data on spending, saving and wellbeing, run their own regressions, and finish the quarter by pitching a venture built on what they have learned.
By the end, students can name the main biases that shape financial decisions and explain where each one comes from; read financial data well enough to tell a real effect from noise; and design a product, policy or habit that helps someone make a better decision.
What it covers
Unit 1
Financial numeracy
Real and nominal values, and why a 3% raise can be a pay cut. Compounding, the rule of 72 and exponential growth bias. An introduction to regression. Credit-card and insurance maths: APR, minimum payments, deductibles, and when to self-insure.
Weeks 1–3
Unit 2
Behavioral biases
Present bias and commitment devices. Loss aversion and the disposition effect. Overconfidence and overtrading. Mental accounting: when labels help and when fungibility matters.
Weeks 4–5
Unit 3
Social and market forces
Money in relationships: joint and separate accounts, fairness and financial communication. Herding, information cascades and meme markets. Money and happiness: the income debate, hedonic adaptation and spending for wellbeing.
Weeks 7–8
Unit 4
Application
Building a personal financial flow chart as a decision aid, then the Behavioral Venture Pitch, presented over the final three sessions.
Weeks 9–10
How it is taught
Classes are in person and mix lecture with discussion, experiments run on the students themselves, and hands-on work with data. There is no textbook. Readings are current research papers and videos, chosen to show how behavioral scientists actually study money. From the second week students analyse datasets on spending, saving and wellbeing in Jamovi, a free statistics package, and learn to interpret a regression table.
Two ideas from the course are on this site as short tests: the Compounding Test, on exponential growth bias, and the Spending Fit Test, on personality and spending.
How it is assessed
30%
Class assignments
Completed in class: data-analysis tasks, short quizzes and case exercises that diagnose a behavioral pattern or design an intervention.
In class
50%
Mid-term and final exams
Multiple choice, closed book. The mid-term covers Units 1–2; the final covers the whole course.
Exams
20%
Behavioral Venture Pitch
Teams design an app, service, policy or organisation whose core purpose is improving people’s financial decisions, and pitch it. Marked on problem definition, the rigour of the behavioral science, feasibility, and the pitch itself, plus peer evaluation.
Team project
Previous courses
2022–24
Psychological Approaches to Research in MarketingPhD seminar, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder.
PhD
2020–25
Buyer BehaviorUndergraduate, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder.
Undergraduate
2018–19
Digital MarketingUCL–Peking University MBA.
MBA
2017–20
Markets and CustomersUCL School of Management.
Undergraduate
Enrolled students will find readings, assignments and the full syllabus on Canvas. Instructors who would like a copy of the syllabus are welcome to get in touch.