Empowering Your Business with Behavioral Economics

Learn how psychological insights and cognitive biases can transform your marketing, pricing, and customer experience strategies.

Applicants: 1
¥680

Time commitment:

2-3 hours/week, 2-4 weeks

Pace:

Self-paced

Subject:

Economics

Language:

English

Level:

Introductory

About this course

This course explores how behavioral economics principles can revolutionize the way you understand and serve your customers. Moving beyond traditional economic assumptions about rational decision-making, you'll discover the hidden psychological forces that actually drive purchasing behavior, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Through real-world case studies and actionable frameworks, you'll learn to recognize and ethically leverage cognitive biases that influence every customer interaction. From pricing strategies to product design, from marketing messages to customer experience optimization, this course provides immediately applicable tools for businesses of all sizes.

Whether you're in marketing, product development, sales, or general management, you'll gain a scientific understanding of human behavior that will transform how you approach business challenges. This isn't about manipulation – it's about aligning your business practices with how human minds actually work, creating value for both your customers and your organization.

What you’ll learn

  • Identify key cognitive biases like anchoring and loss aversion that drive customer purchasing decisions
  • Design choice architectures that guide customers toward better decisions while preserving their freedom
  • Implement psychological pricing strategies using decoy effects, bundling, and framing to enhance perceived value
  • Create habit-forming experiences that drive customer engagement, loyalty, and word-of-mouth recommendations
  • Apply behavioral insights ethically to reduce cart abandonment and increase customer lifetime value
  • Analyze your business practices through a behavioral lens to identify improvement opportunities

About the instructor(s)

Ming Jiang

Associate Professor at Antai College of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Syllabus

  • Session

    1

    Understanding Customer Decision-Making Through Cognitive Biases

    1. How cognitive biases like anchoring, confirmation bias, and social proof unconsciously drive 95% of purchase decisions 2. Why loss aversion makes customers value avoiding losses twice as much as acquiring equivalent gains 3. The role of availability heuristic and recency effect in shaping customer perceptions and choices 4. How framing effects and context determine whether customers perceive options as attractive or unattractive

  • Session

    2

    Choice Architecture: Designing Decisions for Better Outcomes

    1. How default options capture most of decisions through the path of least resistance 2. Why reducing options from 24 to 6 can increase purchases by 10x (choice overload paradox) 3. The power of decoy effects and asymmetric dominance in steering customers toward target options 4. How progressive disclosure and staged decisions reduce cognitive load and increase completion rates

  • Session

    3

    Behavioral Pricing Strategies and Value Perception

    1. How price anchoring makes expensive items seem affordable by comparison to extreme reference points 2. Why charm pricing (ending in 9) triggers value perception while prestige pricing (round numbers) signals quality 3. The psychology of bundling, partitioned pricing, and payment decoupling in reducing price pain 4. How temporal reframing dramatically changes willingness to pay

  • Session

    4

    Building Habit-Forming Products and Customer Loyalty

    1. How the Hooked Model (Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment) creates automatic behaviors 2. Why variable rewards trigger more dopamine and addiction than consistent rewards 3. The transition from external triggers (notifications) to internal triggers (emotions) in habit formation 4. How user investment through data, content, and customization creates switching costs