QWERTY Economics

Superior technological products need not always dominate the market! Wondering? Let Economics explain… Even today people use badly designed keyboards and suffer from pain in their hands. In 1936 August Dvorak designed a new keyboard. People using QWERTY (these are first five keys on the top row) keyboards did not prefer DVORAK keyboards because there would be compatibility problems. People who first used the QWERTY keyboard influenced subsequent users to us them and so on. So, the market was filled with QWERTY users. QWERTY, hence, remains the accepted design. This suggests that superior technology need not be the reason for product dominance. Consumer decision process plays a vital role. Economics calls this decision process "path dependence". That is, our decisions are based on others who earlier, took their decisions. And so it goes on.

NeuroEconomics

Weird, huh? Not very, in the world of stock market. Neuroeconomics is the science of the way our brain reacts when we take a decision. This incorporates using brain-scanning technologies to observe the way neurons react when you make decisions. Neuroeconomists, for instance, study how emoticeuticals (drugs that stabilize emotions) help equity traders take decisions during market crashes. By studying similar market conditions when traders did not take emoticeuticals, neuroeconomists may be able to measure change in behavior and accordingly design drugs to improve their decision taking ability.