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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Behavioral Finance by Duke University

4.4
stars
4,105 ratings

About the Course

We make thousands of decisions every day. Do I cross the road now, or wait for the oncoming truck to pass? Should I eat fries or a salad for lunch? How much should I tip the cab driver? We usually make these decisions with almost no thought, using what psychologists call “heuristics” – rules of thumb that enable us to navigate our lives. Without these mental shortcuts, we would be paralyzed by the multitude of daily choices. But in certain circumstances, these shortcuts lead to predictable errors – predictable, that is, if we know what to watch out for. Did you know, for example, that we are naturally biased towards selling investments that are doing well for us, but holding on to those that are doing poorly? Or that we often select sub-optimal insurance payment plans, and routinely purchase insurance that we don’t even need? And why do so many of us fail to enroll in our employer’s corporate retirement plans, even when the employer offers to match our contributions? Behavioral finance is the study of these and dozens of other financial decision-making errors that can be avoided, if we are familiar with the biases that cause them. In this course, we examine these predictable errors, and discover where we are most susceptible to them. This course is intended to guide participants towards better financial choices. Learn how to improve your spending, saving, and investing decisions for the future....

Top reviews

SK

Feb 25, 2020

Good course! There is just one thing I would improve here - an explanation of the mistakes after the tests are done. This improvement should increase the student`s understanding of specific topics.

M

May 2, 2018

This course was a very good sum up of Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow. Definitely recommend to everyone who would like to know more about our flaws or would like to refresh your knowledge.

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851 - 875 of 1,030 Reviews for Behavioral Finance

By Prarabdha B

Aug 24, 2021

good course

By Mian F U

Aug 23, 2021

Quick intro

By Sharad K

May 25, 2017

Great Class!

By Anuj N

Apr 19, 2020

Very Useful

By Marek S

Jan 29, 2021

Very short

By Mk I

Nov 26, 2022

Good one.

By Glaucia C G

Oct 19, 2022

Amazing!

By Hamed E

Nov 8, 2020

thank you

By Deleted A

Oct 7, 2017

Very good

By 명재영

Jul 10, 2018

good!

By Kian H Y

Jun 13, 2024

Good

By Sumit K

Feb 14, 2022

Good

By Warissara. K

Jul 27, 2024

-

By Kian E

Aug 15, 2021

By Elizabeth T

Dec 23, 2016

I very much enjoyed the information contained in the course - however I did find that it was difficult to apply some of the very nuanced biases to the financial problems posed in the quiz when many of the biases were used in examples outside of the stock market in the course readings leading up to the quiz. I really wish there were more examples for each bias (and more from the world of finance) because some biases were really hard to distinguish from one another. On one hand I did like that I wasn't spoon fed the information for the quizes but on the other I don't feel as though I was fully equipped to answer some of the quiz questions due to the way the information had been presented.

The information built on itself so I found myself going back to week 1 information and week 2 information in week three.

By Puneet G

Apr 16, 2020

The course gives you a nice introduction into the world of behavioural finance but fails to take it any further. There isn't a lot of in-depth theory about the various biases that have been mentioned which sometimes makes it difficult to completely grasp them. Also, the first-week quiz had answer explanations with it, which is IMO very useful; the second and third-week quizzes fail to provide any such help. Because of this and lack of participation in the discussion forums, it becomes very difficult to understand some questions. Overall, I had some fun while doing this course, behavioural finance is a field in which I wanted to dive in for a long time, and this course actually gave me a good start. So for everyone who's looking to learn something about it, I would suggest you give it a chance.

By Kaushal V

Feb 1, 2020

The concepts presented in the course were all exciting, interesting and helpful. The faculty seemed knowledgable on the subject. And this inspired confidence in me as I began. However, I found that the video material was underwhelming in that it did not do justice to the depth of the reading material provided. The reading material left me with questions, which I hoped would be clarified in the videos, but that did not happen. I often saw myself referring to YouTube to seek explanations. I often struggled to find reliable definitions of the terminology used in the course. And that did not help when I was doing the quiz. Many concepts from the quiz were simply left out from the course (e.g. Stages in a bubble). I had to do exhaustive googling in order to answer the questions in the quiz.

By Marcel M d A P

Apr 28, 2020

A comprehensive list of biases in the content was selected. The professors are very good at explaining the content in the video lessons. However, there were just too few of them and too much to read on our own. Also the written material explain biases and effects in a bit of a complicated manner. At the end of the reading, usually I didn't know what was theory, what was a bias and what was an"effect" or a fallacy. When a bias relates to another bias, sometimes a famous one not originated in the behavioral finance theory, then it get even more confusing. Even with those issues, I liked the course and would love to have personal classes with the professors some day. Duke university seems to be really top notch.

By Juan C

Jul 1, 2018

This course gives you a basic understanding of the main financial biases. Everything is shown mostly through examples which, in general, are very interesting. However, in my opinion, the course is very disorganized. Instead of devoting a single section to one topic, topics are spread through several several pdf's. This makes it very difficult to review one topic, as you have no other choice but to glance through all the pdf's to view the material on a single topic. Also, the videos are kind of irrelevant as they simply and very briefly summarize parts of the pdf's that you have already seen without providing any additional content or value.

By Soon M Y

Jul 5, 2020

I think that the material was fairly straightforward, but the process of teaching it felt like it can be improved. There are many nuances in the definitions, and i don't think there was enough time spent discussing these nuances. Subsequent quizzes throw questions at you in hopes that you remember these nuances, but don't do much to help you understand what you've gotten wrong. The same can be said across some of the material where the notes themselves have random questions, but if you don't understand or know the answer, there's no easy way to find out what you misunderstood.

By Michael T

Jul 23, 2021

Some great content covered here and I enjoyed the exercises throughout that invited me to use own behaviour as a learning tool.

That said, there are a lot of concepts introduced here in quick succession without clarity. It would be good to present them more clearly in groupings or an overview that could be reinforced throughout. The quiz sections we're also very difficult to follow, and I still don't understand why some answers were incorrect. It was especially difficult to do the last quiz as the web pages included in the reading material no longer work.

By Ashot B

Apr 19, 2020

On the one hand, such a course is highly demanded and needed, for obvious reasons. However, this particular course is a subject of further and considerable development, in my opinion, of course. 1. I was confused by all this new terminology. While I well informed about many things discussed and clearly understood the explanations, the terms themselves caused a lot of problems. 2. the manner of speech of the second teacher is not student-friendly. So, as a first step ok, but I rather avoid DUKE courses in future,,,

By Samuel N

Jan 12, 2020

I liked the material given throughout the course. Interesting examples were chosen to help us understand the cognitive biases that include decision making, and the lecture slides were very helpful.

My one gripe is that the quizzes did not give enough feedback. The last quiz seemed to have some material that was not covered in the course, and there was little to no feedback for the answers.

Overall, I would recommend this course to a friend on the condition that more feedback be given for the quizzes.

By Abhinut S

Aug 26, 2019

I believed that the original length of this course is more than 3 weeks (the instructor even mentioned that the course is 14 weeks!?). The reason I point this out is because some of the questions in the quizzes does not cover in the lectures videos of the course. Hence, from my point of view, the quizzes is quite difficult even if you have completed all the lecture videos. Moreover, it would be great if the course have more than one instructor, otherwise it feel like a monologue.

By Nishant V S

May 13, 2020

Course material was inadequate. Certain biases were not explained properly with relevant examples. Quiz question were based on such biases & so it made it difficult for me to solve the quiz. Quiz answer explanations were not given. How are we supposed to know the reasoning behind correct answers without the explanations ? Please make these improvements.

Apart from that I learnt quite a lot of basics from this course. It is now my duty to explore these topics further in-depth