So cognitive biases are the beating heart of behavioral economics and finance. But where do they come from? Are they innate or learned? Or are they epigenetic, some complex combination of the two where environmental factors trigger a gene for one or more of them? But there’s another possibility, namely that you catch them. Yep just like a co...

So you haven’t heard of behavioral accounting? Wow you haven’t lived! It does exist and it has generally been defined as accounting for the differential impact of behaviors on the value of an organization. But I have a different perspective on behavioral accounting. As in, how does the behavior of the preparer of an accounting document impact its r...

So behavioral finance is hot these days. Authors such as Nouriel Roubini and Malcolm Gladwell have popularized it with the Great Unwashed. And academics are starting to catch on too, so that's progress. The problem is that for all its intellectual fecundity, behavioral finance suffers from a major problem. That is, that it hasn’t been useful from a...

Scientists are always looking for the next Big Thing so they all got excited several months ago about what looked like the discovery of the long-predicted gravitational waves. I got pretty excited too. I even blogged about it (“Ripples In Corporate Space-Time: Do Companies Have An Internal Clock?”). Now it looks like it was wrong. Dust on the lens ...

I guess you noticed that Calpers has just ditched investing in hedge funds. The official line was that it was too complicated. The truth of the matter was that it didn’t work. .   That tells us a lot about hedge funds and investing generally and you know I am going to draw my own conclusions from that. First it’s been clear for a long tim...

I guess you read about Apple buying Dr. Dre and Beats? Something to add to the fading Apple cool factor? I think I am swimming against the tide on this one, but streaming music doesn’t sound to me like the next frontier. It’s already here, there are lots of players and it’s becoming commoditized. Amazon, of course, just got involved. Did you notice...

I can’t get used to all the reporting on Donald Sterling. The media have gone to town on it. He’s a bad guy no doubt; but there's even worse. How about the unspeakable and truly despicable Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Bok Haram, if you want the lowest villain of them all? Nonetheless this got me to thinking (again) about the nature of leadership....

So now genetic testing has become de rigueur amongst the jet set, the biological equivalent of Google Glass. As well it might be since Google has invested in this area also (is there anything that Google hasn’t invested in?). What does this mean for everyone else? Well there was a time there when it looked like once you could read the human genome,...

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