Author

Places

I come back and go to places that are more than just places, to which I must give thanks. Aragon, where I was born, from South to North, and where I have family and friends. Valencia where I grew up and studied, again, I have family and friends there. Barcelona, where I live and work, of course, here are my family and friends.  

People and business

I always like knowing about people, individual –psychology- and teams, and their environment -masters, graduate and continuous training- and for both, people and companies, economics and finance. You can see my summarized CV. I have been dedicated to this, particularly what drives people in the workplace, how to build a team, to pursue their shared purposes, to achieve their best results. Person and purpose, which means capacity but also decision and action. And this is to find and achieve the meaning to things, the project, the people that come with us … Probably, it will help us a little to be happier.  

Behavioral economics

I also think that “the basis of economic policies and, in general, of all the social sciences is psychology”, Pareto dixit, 1906. We need time experiencing to explain this. Behavioral Economics (BE) uses psychological experimentation to develop decision-making theories in people and has identified a number of bias as a result of the way that we think and feel. The BE is trying to change the way that economists set standard perceptions of people on the value and preferences expressed. According to BE, people are not always interested in themselves or thinking how to be able to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs, nor do have individual stable preferences. Our thinking is subject to limited knowledge, feedback and processing power, which often involves uncertainty and is affected by the context in which we take decisions. Most of our choices are not the result of careful deliberation. In the same way also the information generated automatically by the environment affects us. We also live in the moment, we tend to resist change, we are poor predictors about future behavior, subject to distorted memory, and affected by physiological and emotional states. Finally, we are social animals with social preferences, those expressed in confidence, reciprocity and fairness. We are susceptible to social norms and we have a need for self-consistency. According to the Behavioral Economics Guide (2014).   Which is the level of development? Let’s go to the reality, in 2014, 136 countries have used science behavioral in at least one aspect of their public policy, and 51 have developed policy general initiatives influenced by behavioral sciences. It is clear, word is spreading, Thaler (2015).   There are two fields: (1) Behavioral Finance and (2) the implementation of the behavioural economics practices in the human resources management. I think in order to be able to add some knowledge it is necessary to be focused, search specialization. What I can provide is what I have been able to learn, twenty years in a financial and insurance company environment. The experience in a high performing, medium size, in terms of people, business group, which is now the Spanish market leader and crates innovative proposals and future for the wellbeing of citizens.  

• Let’s talk about behavioral finance. Conventional finance theory about countries, institutions, businesses and individuals says that they are rational and seek to maximize their wealth. However there are many decisions in which emotions and our behavior influence our decisions not always predictably and rationally. Behavioral finance is a new field that is looking for to combine behavioral and cognitive psychology with financial and economic conventions to provide explanations about why people sometimes take irrational or not optimal financial decisions. It discusses long-term savings, financial literacy, savings in reduced income families, risk aversion, mental accounting, effects of social norms, over confidence, over choice, anchor effect.
• We are also going to discuss the application of behavioral economics in the practices of human resources management, how We can reinvent the way We work with people in our business, how we do it for “humans” and not for “econs”. Practices of human resources should be tested and validated, as any application area. Practices of human resources should pay attention into our understanding of human nature: we have a limited will power, a bounded rationality and our interest in ourselves is also limited. We may collect experimental contributions and practices of how the intrinsic motivation can help the remuneration, the deferred remuneration, hyperbolic discount of our incentives, choice architecture in the process of employee experience… And so on.