Behavioral Economics recommendations. If I liked Freakanomics and loved Predictably Irrational....

I liked Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill. Tbe new edition has been updated to cover the internet. It's sounds like it's aimed at the consumer, but the information is more beneficial for the seller.

I am not quite sure what you are talking about, Robert, but I think I have some ideas.
Are you talking about A2K as being the core business? Or something totally different?

Something totally different, it's a B2B business that we consider our day job to A2K's leisure.

We tried to offer something that the industry really hadn't ever offered and an example of a valuable insight I took from Predictably Irrational was that humans can only valuate things relatively, so even comparing yourself to yourself favorably can better position your product to them. They used the example of the first breadmaker, that only began to sell when a more expensive model was introduced that made it look better by comparison.

That and other insights about price anchoring (the notion that the your assessment on price and value is hugely influenced by the first price at which you seriously consider the purchase) led us to deliberately price some of our packages poorly to set different anchors for comparison and to make other packages look good in comparison. In a vacuum our clients had a hard time deciding whether our product has value, because it was so new to them (we used a very targeted model that nobody else ever had the scale for) so we realized we needed to find ways that they can evaluate the value of our offerings relative to something. So we will compare ourselves more to the competition (which offer fundamentally worse products) and create tired packages that let people compare us to ourselves.

The example from the book was that The Economist priced their web only subscription at around $50 and their print at around $100 and then their print and web subscription also for $100. The print-0nly subscription is just there as a decoy, anyone who gets it is daft. The whole point was to make the print plus web version look more valuable through comparison, and the presence of the "decoy" led more people to opt for the more expensive subscription than the online-only version.

Anyway, I'm not looking for specific economic or business information here, I'm really just looking for books in this style, and it could really be about any subject. I'm looking for fascinating, insightful easy reading.

I like Paco Underhill too. His website always has some interesting stuff: http://www.envirosell.com/. I particularly like the "street poll" section and used to watch it regularly.

Faith Popcorn is also interesting but her site doesn't offer much and her services are very, very expensive. Once in a while she publishes a book that is well worth reading. http://www.faithpopcorn.com/ (not a very good site, unfortunately). Her preditictions for 2010 (in brief) http://kjahnke.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/fpbr-2010-predictions.pdf

My prediction for Faith Popcorn: she needs to give away a little more info to attract paying clients.

I can recommend pretty much everything by Robert H. Frank. Most of his popular books are about the economics of inequality, but he also has one that's quite similar to Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational. It's title is The Economic Naturalist: In Search for Explanations of Everyday Enigmas.

Another book in this vein that I liked was Tim Hartford: The Undercover Economist.

Five years ago, I would have also plugged Steven Landsburg: The Armchair Economist. Today I'm more reserved about Landsburg. I think he's frequently pushing conventional economics too far just for the sake of provocation. But you may disagree. You can check him out by reading his column on Slate.com.

Thanks, I'm especially interested in any that are very anecdotal in presentation. You wouldn't happen to know of a good place to get these in epub format would you? I want to start collecting books again, but I'm going to do it digital this time.

Other than the one GW recommended (thanks!) do you have specific titles to recommend? And are they are entertaining as the very anecdotal titles I mentioned?

Malcolm Gladwell isn't economics precisely but it's a lot of behavior stuff, and very anecdotal. "Blink" is pretty good. (That's a tag-on to what has already been suggested though, I don't think it's better than Thomas' recommendations.)

Well, Frank's and Landsburg's books are available on Kindle. Not sure where you would get Harford's.

Thanks Robert for posting this - I will be following closely as I love Freakanomics - there is supposed to be a second Freakanomics book as well that came out recently - haven't gotten it yet as unfortunately I am reading my kids' books that they need to write reports on.

You'd probably be interested in William Poundstone. He writes more on academic subjects rather than the "Freakonomics" type of economic case studies, but his writing is accessible and covers some very interesting topics. I can personally recommend his Prisoner's Dilemma (on game theory) and Gaming the Vote (on electoral systems).

Game theory is something I find more interesting than economics so thanks!

Hmm, Kindle is proprietary and I don't want to start my digital book collection that way. I hope I can find an open format version of the books for sale, I don't want to lose my book collections yet again.

I love Paco Underhill's books. The other one is named "The Call of the Mall". A lot of his work is about how people interact with the physical space where they are shopping and how that influences their purchases. I think it's fascinating reading for any person who shops.

One book I've been on the lookout for is called "The Undercover Economist". It was recommened to me by someone when they saw me reading "Freakonomics". They thought "The Undercover Economist" was a much better book.