A Critical Review on the Book “Fundamentals of Behavioral Economics and Finance”

The Fundamentals of behavioral economics and finance by Ali Saidi and Seyed Mohamad Javad Farhanian was first published in 2012 and the second edition was out in 2015. While the book covers a wide variety of subjects in behavioral economics and finance, it fails to logically connect the materials together within a broader context. The authors neither provided theoretical foundations nor investigated applied aspects of behavioral economics and finance systematically. Furthermore, a good deal of materials is translated from English. The authors provide a list of behavioral biases followed by prescriptions to fight against them without proofing that increasing information cause behavior change. This is not consistent with an evidence-based approach to behavioral economics and finance. Moreover, the existence of personal and unproven prescriptions in the book is simply unscientific that undermines the credibility of behavioral economics and finance.