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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Behavioral Finance by Duke University

4.4
stars
3,863 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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26 - 50 of 986 Reviews for Behavioral Finance

By Shivam S

Mar 16, 2020

Very good course. I learnt about many biases which I often make in making financial decisions and now I hope I will correct those. Cheers to the team coursera for this course

By Alexios B

Jun 9, 2021

There's no doubt that the content of the course is interesting, the lecturers know their stuff, and the recorded lectures that do exist are quite well-made.

However, the course feels like it was a project whose funding was cut and was finished in a hurry. First of all, it is only 3 weeks long, so the content is rather limited (since access is free to all the material, this is not such a big problem in and of itself). The first week is structured rather well and the quiz reflects the material of the week adequately. However, after the first week the quality decreases very rapidly. The videos become shorter and fewer (a lot of reading material is given, some of which are links to external websites that don't work anymore) and the quizzes start containing material that was not covered in the lectures at all. Also, no feedback is given for wrong responses and the questions are extremely vague. Week 3 is especially egregious in this respect and I must admit that I have no idea how I managed to pass the quiz.

Overall, I was expecting something better from such a famous university and I would not recommend the course.

By Jane A

Nov 19, 2020

Really intriguing concepts and material, and engaging presenters. There's a lot of shifting terminology, though, i.e. a bias may be called one thing in one place, and then referred to by a different term in the quiz. The quizzes are very frustrating, because so many of the questions call for pretty subjective selection of multiple possible answers -- there are way too many ways to be "incorrect," with no room to discuss why an answer could be appropriate. It's a short, basic intro kind of course, though, and did its job of making me quite interested in this particular lens on finance/economics.

By Deleted A

Mar 24, 2020

The course is mismarketed as Behavioral Finance, when really its mostly (80%) basic behavioral "economics" that is just as well described in several popular books. The only areas they attempt to relate to finance are 1) mutual funds fees don't justify performance 2) past asset bubbles. Jack Bogle could have told you in the 1970s about #1 above and its nothing new for most people these days. Similarly while asset bubbles are interesting, there is no forward looking views on how understanding behavioral paradigms can help either prevent bubbles or help investors make better decisions during a bubble.

By Gerry-Ann J

Oct 4, 2020

The material is impossibly worded so if you are not a economics or finance student but want to increase your financial literacy it's useless. The classes drag on and on and on and are thrown together quite haphazardly with no discernable progression of ideas or sense of cohesiveness. The examples are so convoluted, you just want them to be over and done with. As there is very little in the way of proper explanation of concepts, you're likely to be confused The quiz consists of questions so long that by the time you're done reading them you don't even know what the question is and you have 0 desire to answer it at all and I can truly say, a google search does a much better job of explaining any of the concepts in the course than reading the material. IF YOU'RE NOT A FINANCE/ECONOMICS/MATHEMEATICS MAJOR and you thought the course would be a useful tool for personal financial literacy and decision-making...it's a hard no.

By Ken M

Nov 10, 2020

The videos are honestly teaching very little, and the slides do not at all help the understanding. They are disorganized, and you have to comb through them and collect and interpret information to be able to understand the topic. Often, in the end I found myself looking for exactly those biases on Wikipedia which the courses were supposed to explain in the first place.

Then suddenly, you would have completely new topics popping up in the quiz, which are nowhere to be found in the slides or videos.

From Duke Universtiy, I would have expected a higher standard - this one was sub par, even if it had been done by a "normal" university.

By Торгунаков Н Ю

Oct 31, 2020

This is my first Coursera course and I am glad I took it.

However, looking at other courses I am taking right now, I can say that there is room for improvement. For example, there could be intermediate tests during lections, lections themself could be more informative (there were more material in presentations than in videos). Also it would be great to participate in (maybe peer-reviewed) open answer task based on some existed financial case. I have seen some bad reviews about tests of this course: I agree, that it is necessary to have clarifications about anserws (they were missing in second and third test). But I would not be so upset about the fact that there was questions in tests that weren't directly covered by lectures: overall it was interesting to guess anserws by my own based on studied material and some web search.

Nevertheless, this course still was a good introduction into the behavioral finance sphere.

By Lilian D

Sep 16, 2017

Generally it's a fantastic online course, which gives me so much insight to an area I have previously unaware of. Behavioral Finance is meaningful because it takes human behavior factors into account of finance models, especially psychology factor. It offers me new insight into a study of interdisciplinary subjects. Class outlines and videos are well-organized and challenging. However, I think the test questions are sometimes a little bit difficult, and test2 and test3 should have answers and analysis like test1. It will always be better to review the knowledge you learned after making some mistakes and being eager to know the causes. Generally, I love the course!

By Arun C

Jan 2, 2019

Thank you very much for provide such an excellent platform to learn. I want to learn this course “Behavioural Finance” from last 3 years but don’t have path and guidance. But by Coursera with Tata capital I get this opportunity.

As far as course is concern Excellent course. Helps to establish the balance between probabilistic truth and illusions that infect our decision-making. Insightful short course on psychological background on investing. The course is well designed, especially the case study examples.

By KYRIAKOS M

Aug 12, 2016

This course is really interesting, especially for people that are into Business Management and Psychology. In my humble opinion, every human being is a decision maker in their everyday life and this course( in conjuction with other sciences) is a tool of paramount importance to make better and more effective decisions in the everyday life. I feel really happy to have had the opportunity to learn all that i have learned and become a better decision maker starting from..now!

By Nereo M

Dec 2, 2020

The course is something very new and very different from where I have been and from my experience as an operations management executive. The jargon and language are just new to me. I learned a lot, which I can apply to my new mission and passion as a financial coach. Thank you.

By Alexander M

Aug 16, 2017

Great course! It allows to understand the twisted logic that run in our heads. Helps to establish the balance between probabilistic truth and illusions that infect our decision-making. Thanks a lot!

By Olivia S

Aug 10, 2020

The instructor was not only knowledgeable, but she also took the time to give real-world applications. Wonderful course full of information to help us better understand our clients.

By Shivam P

Oct 10, 2020

I thought it would be an easy one sitting course, but it is not. PPTs are excellent, and quizzes will test you properly. Just be aware that you can't finish it in just 5 hours.

By PRASHANT M

Oct 27, 2020

The course was interesting and made you think differently in a given situation.

By Richard K

Oct 31, 2020

Excellent insights into the psychology of money, finance and investing

By Aidan C

Oct 5, 2016

The course information was fairly useful, but the execution not so much. The material spent more time on somewhat repetitive examples than it did on explaining the actual concepts those examples were illustrating, and the videos were primarily just lecturers reading parts of the slides that you had already read, but in their own words.

The tests, sadly, were poorly-designed for the subject matter of the course. Behavioral biases - like many psychological phenomena - overlap to some degree, and the frequently-used format of 'choose all that apply' - or worse 'choose all that might apply' - resulted in trying to guess what the test-setter was looking for rather than trying to apply the information that had been learned. When you find yourself trying to decide between the best answer based on what you have learned and a conceptually worse answer that happens to meet the wording of the question - and trying to guess whether the test-setter is looking to prove your understanding or catch you in a mistake - then you start to suspect that the course has been designed more as a way to earn grades than to actually learn.

By Silvia R

Jul 16, 2018

The program of the course is very interesting. To me a better link within the biases and the cases shown in the test would help a lot the students to memorize concepts faster. The reading material is quite a lot and sometimes it seems like more pencilled notes for a lecture that a real "manual", that is worth to have for study but also as a valuable take away after the course. To me it was so not easy to fully understand at the at a glance the connection between biases and real cases. If I may I suggest to split the course in 4/5 weeks (so to dilute a bit the assimilation), to structure a bit more the reading material (as a quick manual more than supporting slides) and to set more exercises to learn fast connecting biases with real examples or cases. This course has a lot of potential to me and in any case gave me a lot of food for thought! Thanks to Duke University and to its Professors for this opportunity!

By Matthew M

Apr 1, 2020

In comparison to other courses on here I felt that this was poor. It is very light on content, the videos are very short, and the accompanying reading is extremely brief, light, and doesn't really even give basic definitions of what terms mean.

When answering the quiz questions I had to rely on my own knowledge for most things because nowhere does it say something as simple as "this behavioural bias can be defined as follows".

Generally, everything is very convoluted, doesn't give appropriate context as to what behavioural finance is or even why it came about.

Overall very poor - you can get more just researching it yourself or reading the basics on Wikipedia to be honest.

By Isaac B

Dec 11, 2019

I'm very disappointed with this course. The course materials resembles a bunch of notes jolted together, like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces. I can't make sense of the theory yet. And, I consider myself quite a bright person who is constantly taking courses on Coursera. I finished this course if the feeling I haven't learnt that anything. I expected the video lessons would put some sense into the slides, but they are close to useless, which is a pity as this is the only course on Behavioural Finance on Coursera. I'm very frustrated and disappointed :-(

By Max B

May 9, 2020

This course offers interesting content via slide decks that are the focal point of the course. In my opinion, the videos did not provide any additional information that was not laid out in the slides. The professors are clearly very experienced on the topics. I would have loved to hear more from them instead of reading slide decks.

I would like for the quizzes to provide some form of feedback around why a user got the question correct or incorrect. I would also like for the videos to be the focal point of the course with animations and graphs.

By Doug K

Aug 27, 2020

I've taken several Coursera courses, and this is the worst one by far. Yes there is useful information, but it is very poorly taught. The video presentations don't add much beyond the reading assignments. And the "quizes" are an extension of the material, more like homework than a quiz. I would think Duke University would be embarrassed to put their name on this course. After all, that's where Dan Ariely calls home, so the university has talent, but it is not on display here.

By Mathieu S

Feb 26, 2019

The topics are very interesting, but they are also very complex, and I don't think they were explained in sufficient detail, which caused the exams to be frustrating. Further, an answer key was only provided for the Week 1 exam, and I still don't know why some answers were correct or incorrect on the other exams. I also don't find the use of both videos and documents to be useful as most of the information seemed to be included in the documents.

By Leah F

Apr 30, 2020

While it was interesting, The materials itself I felt was poorly written. When taking the test I found myself thinking this did not go over any of what was in the lesson plans. They need to offer definitions of the words and examples. But for the value I thought it was a fair price. I am however having issues trying to share certificate via anything.

By Adhruth S

May 30, 2020

The content in the slides are good and interesting but other than that it is really not worth doing this course. There are a very few videos and most of the concepts that are important are not covered in them. Videos seem to be missing in the course and the flow of content is not in a proper manner. Not satisfied with this course at all.