Undergraduate - UnitECC2600 - Behaviour, rationality and organisation

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2014 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 3, 0.125 EFTSL

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Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Business and Economics
Organisational Unit	Department of Economics
Offered	Clayton Second semester 2014 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Associate Professor Elias Khalil

Synopsis

A basic pillar of economic theory is that behaviour is governed by the response to incentives (what psychologists term 'extrinsic motivation'). But 'intrinsic motivation' plays a great role. People conceive incentives differently depending on the context. The unit elaborates on the interface of incentives and psychological factors such as bounded rationality, self-deception, weakness of will, and regret, to understand the complexity of human motivation. The unit also focuses on how organisations harness human motivation in the face of asymmetry of information (which usually undermines cooperation) and bounded rationality.

Outcomes

The learning goals associated with this unit are to:

investigate the interplay of psychological variables with economic incentives
investigate the different meaning of rationality
investigate how rationality, and its multi-level meaning, relate to the emotions
investigate why the rational choice approach is useful even when people behave

irrationally

investigate how could self-deception and self-rationalisation be possible if people are basically rational.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 50%
Examination: 50%

Chief examiner(s)

Associate Professor Elias Khalil

Workload requirements

3 hours per week

Prerequisites

ECC1000

Prohibitions

MGC2600