Three years ago, a crowd of eager and oblivious Wal-Mart customers waited outside their local Wal-Mart on Black Friday—a feeling of egocentricity and craze radiated from the enormous mob. After the doors had been opened, and shoppers had shopped, a Wal-Mart employee was found dead—trampled by hundreds and thousands of ignorant consumers. The tragic story of this innocent Wal-Mart employee is one of the many modern examples of mob mentality, an essential concept of crowd psychology. Charles Mackay
Many critics accused Vonnegut of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters perhaps they were right because he didn’t only use references from others books and writers but he also used references and characters from his earlier books and moreover the first and the last sentences of Slaughterhouse-Five as a self-reflexive quotation from the novel within the novel. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five we learn that Vonnegut dedicated this book to O’Hare’s wife Mary and to a former
letting us as human beings repeat such a dreaded type of history, but must be taken with a grain of salt as well during such analysis. “Tulpenwoede (tulip madness) resulted in big increases in tulip prices. At the beginning of 1637, some tulip contracts reached a level about 20 times the level of three months earlier” (Economist.com). Popular belief is that this bubble was brought about by market irrationality, ideas that were advanced by Charles Mackay and what many current day scholars draw their
Standard finance theory as defined by Thaler (1999) assumes “the representative agent” acts rationally by following the principles of the Expected Utility Theory and making future predictions based on rational information. It assumes there is no element of cognitive bias or sentiment affecting asset prices (O’Keeffe, 2014). The Expected Utility Theorem introduced by Bernoulli (1738) and further developed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) states that the “decision maker” bases their decision regarding