Last year some colleagues and I conducted an experiment to see if software product managers are likely to fall victim to biases predicted by prospect theory when deciding what a software product should do. Our results showed they do.

Laurie Santos had much more fun with this topic, conducting behavioural economics experiments based on prospect theory with monkeys. Her aim was to see if our biases are deeply innate, or just bad habits we learn. Her conclusion was that a monkey economy is as irrational as our own. Or, as I prefer to say, that software engineers make the same mistakes as monkeys.

Laurie’s presentation at TED is far more engaging than ours, so I include it here …

Maybe this is why they call me monkey?!