The Upside of Irrationality

Title: The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Author: Dan Ariely
Genre: Popular Science
Pages: 352
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Dan Ariely is back with a sequel to Predictably Irrational.  In this book, he covers new experiments that he has run, and explains how our irrational behavior doesn't always result in bad consequences.  He covers a wide range of topics, with the book being separated into a section on irrationality at work and another section on irrationality at home.
Thoughts: I really enjoyed Ariely's first book, Predictably Irrational.  The sequel is just as clever, but for me it held fewer "aha" moments, in which I'm really wowed by learning something I didn't know before.  Maybe that's because I'm already pretty familiar with behavioral economics, so I'm a tough customer in that regard.  My only other complaint is that I didn't feel like the book lived up to its title.  I didn't find much good about irrationality at all in the book, and still don't see how it is anything but just a continuation of his first book.  Still, Ariely is a great writer, and I really enjoyed the book quite a bit.  My favorite part was the section on the "Ikea effect"--the fact that we value something more when we put it together, even if putting it together doesn't require much effort on our part (e.g. by adding the eggs and oil to a cake mix, we like the cake more than if we didn't have to add them).  Overall, a solid book if you like this kind of thing.
Disclaimer:  I don't remember anything too sketchy in this one.