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| Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $10.85
You Save: $5.10 (32%)
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 44781
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0195340671
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780195340679
Publication Date: July 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-9 of 9 | | « PREV | | |
I added it to my syllabus immediately June 6, 2007
I originally bought this book as a birthday present for my brother, a philosopher, and then immediately stole it from him. (I gave it back after I bought my own copy.) The book paints a frightening picture of how group processes can lead us very, very astray. In many ways, it reads as a sequel to his book on Punitive Damages, which documents frightening trends for experimental jury pools to assign harsher damages than the individual jurors planned to assign in pre-deliberation surveys.
I quickly added the chapters on group deliberation failures to the syllabus for my class on psychology and economics. My only trepidation was that I am also assigning sections of Punitive Damages and Laws of Fear, so there's now an entire unit on Cass Sunstein's work. But he does an excellent job of exploring in readable prose the societal consequences of psychological influences on choice. As such, his books offer a very accessible mirror into aspects of bounded rationality or heuristics & biases that we study in economics. I figure the marginal contribution of this book, in terms of class discussion and actual post-exam take-aways, exceed the contribution of a few more technical empirical papers.... At least, I hope that turns out to be the case!
very useful little book November 15, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
thought provoking useful book with wide application. i am very interested in social media & how to use vehicles such as blogs & wikis.
also, very insightful and counterintuitive info about group processes, decision-making ect
written in a simple clear way
Mind opening December 1, 2007
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
After reading Linked, and Freakonomics, this is helping me chase down yet more ideas about how the underlying networks on which society functions work. Or don't work.
 Very Enlightening! October 13, 2008
The book provides an excellent overview of various methods for knowledge aggregation and group collaboration, particularly statistical averaging, deliberation, prediction markets, wikis, open source projects, and blogs.
Sunstein provides a penetrating and balanced analysis of both the potential benefits and risks of each form of aggregation/collaboration, thus giving us some guidance on when to use (and not use) each method, and how to do it more effectively. I wish the book had provided clear summaries of that guidance, but it's still clear enough as is.
Sunstein is definitely a great writer. The result is a book which is easy and enjoyable to read, and the pages tend to fly by despite much of the material being a bit technical.
This book has started me thinking in new ways about some important issues, and it's not often that a book comes along which can do that. This is truly a book for our times, and is on the cutting edge on several fronts.
Very highly recommended for anyone who needs to, or wants to, deal with other people in order to get things done - in other words, everyone!
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