Coming Home to Something New: A Week of Behavioral Economics at IIM Bangalore

“We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable.” — Dan Ariely

As a student of economics, I’d always been interested in the subject. But something didn’t sit well. The models explained concepts, but there were always a number of “assumptions” that underpinned these ideas, and that gap nagged at me. The assumption of rationality in particular felt like a convenient fiction. Real people hesitate, regret, and contradict themselves in ways that no supply-demand curve could fully account for. So when Global Network Week offered a deep-dive into behavioural economics at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), signing up was an easy decision.

But there was another dimension, too. IIMB is located in Bangalore, my hometown. This was not just an academic exchange; it was a homecoming. And yet, despite growing up in the city, I had never had occasion to sit in one of its classrooms. It took Hitotsubashi ICS business school, a global academic network, and a flight from Tokyo, to finally change that, and I’m glad I took the opportunity.

The Setting: A Campus That Earns Its Reputation

IIMB’s campus is often described as an “oasis”. You can feel the immediate drop in temperature and the peace and quiet all throughout right as you step in. Designed by the architect B.V. Doshi, its distinctive granite buildings sit amid an expanse of greenery that feels almost incongruous with the hustle and bustle of Bangalore just beyond its walls. Walking through the campus was a humbling experience. Many titans of Indian industry and commerce have walked through these halls, including unicorn founders like PC Mustafa, Peyush Bansal and others who have been trailblazers in their respective industries, making it a humbling place to spend a week as a student. There is a sense of intellectual seriousness here, communicated not just through reputation but through the physical environment itself. It was the ideal backdrop for what turned out to be an intensive and immersive week.

The Cohort

Global Network Week brought together students from across the Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM), a consortium of over 30 leading business schools worldwide. Our cohort represented a genuinely wide range of countries and professional backgrounds, from Brazil and Canada to Australia and beyond; with a handful of participants, myself included, who brought a local Indian perspective to the table.

What this diversity produced in the classroom was something that a more homogeneous group simply could not replicate. Discussions about behavioral concepts like loss aversion or the perception of fairness took on different textures when filtered through different cultural lenses. A framework that seemed intuitive to one participant could feel counterintuitive to another; and those moments of friction were often the most insightful, as a learning experience.

The Learning: When Theory Becomes Practice

The course was led by Professor Ritwik Banerjee, and across five days covered an ambitious sweep of behavioral economics, from heuristics and biases to loss aversion, mental accounting, impatience and self-control, the economics of discrimination and gender, and the psychology of scarcity. What distinguished the course, however, was not simply the breadth of topics but how abstract theoretical concepts were grounded in something tangible.

Three takeaways stood out most:

1. Rationality Is More Complicated Than We Think

Drawing on Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the course reframed what it actually means to make a “rational” decision. Heuristics, i.e., the mental shortcuts we rely on to navigate complexity, are not occasional quirks. They are deeply embedded features of cognition that systematically introduce error. Much of what we consider sound judgment is quietly shaped by processes operating beneath our awareness. This was not a comfortable insight, but it was an important one.

2. Framing Is Not Peripheral: It Is the Decision

Through anchoring, mental accounting, and the endowment effect, the course made a compelling case that economic behavior cannot be understood by examining options in isolation. How a choice is presented, what reference point is made salient, and what has already been experienced are often the primary drivers of an outcome. The practical implications of this are considerable: in pricing, policy, negotiation, and everyday management, the architecture of a decision matters as much as its content.

3. Loss Aversion and Its Everyday Reach

Grounded in Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory, the session on loss aversion unpacked one of behavioral economics’ most powerful and counterintuitive findings: that the pain of a loss is felt more acutely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. The session showed how this asymmetry gets embedded into pricing models and consumer products; free trials, for instance, are engineered precisely around the idea that once a consumer has experienced something, the prospect of losing access to it outweighs the rational calculation of cost. What left the strongest impression on me was how many things in our world can actually be explained and understood using these frameworks, and that was revelatory.

The Field Visit: Behavioral Economics in a Bazaar

If the classroom sessions were where the frameworks were introduced, KR Market was where they came alive.

KR Market is one of Bangalore’s most iconic commercial hubs, a sprawling, sensory-rich bazaar where vendors and buyers negotiate across hundreds of stalls in a compressed, high-energy environment. Our cohort was taken there as part of a field visit titled “Behavioral Economics in the Bazaar,” and the exercise was as simple as it was revelatory: observe, and identify what you recognize.

Anchoring was on full display almost immediately. Vendors opened with elevated initial prices, establishing a reference point that shaped the entire negotiation that followed, regardless of what the “true” price of the item might have been. Mental accounting was visible in the way buyers categorized spending across different stalls, treating money differently depending on the product or context. What made the visit particularly valuable was the speed of it all: these were not slow, deliberate decisions. They were instinctive, rapid, and repeated hundreds of times over the course of a single morning. Theory, encountered at that pace and scale, stops feeling like theory.

For me, personally, there was an additional layer. KR Market is a place I had been to before, as a child, as a local. Returning to it as a student of behavioral economics, with a framework for understanding what I was seeing, felt like putting on a new pair of glasses. The market had not changed. My ability to read it had.

The Project: Designing an Experiment

The week’s group project required us to design and run a small-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) using Qualtrics, a research platform for surveys and experimental data collection. My team chose to examine “service charge”: specifically, how compulsory tipping policies affect customer satisfaction and purchasing behavior.

One aspect of the course that I found really engaging was the process of doing RCTs, something that I had no experience in prior to this class. Designing a clean experimental question, controlling for confounding variables, and coding up a survey that would actually yield usable data required a level of rigor that I did not fully appreciate at first. What also added to the challenges was working across a mixed-nationality team added another dimension: assumptions about what was “normal” in service contexts differed considerably across cultures, which forced us to pressure-test our framing and consider how context-dependent our research question really was. Despite these challenges, the experience clarified my understanding of experimental methodology in ways that a purely theoretical approach never could have. 

Beyond the Classroom

No account of this week would be complete without mentioning the lunch. On one of the afternoons, the cohort was taken for a traditional South Indian spread served on banana leaves; a meal that was, for many of my international classmates, entirely new. For me though, it was familiar in the deepest sense. Watching the reactions around the table; the slight uncertainty about what to touch first, the gradual relaxation as flavors landed well, the questions about what each dish was, was a small reminder of how sharing culture through food can connect people across languages and backgrounds. I was honored to have the chance to share my culture this way and it was great to see everyone enjoy the food in an authentic style.

A Homecoming, and Something More

Returning to Bangalore, through the lens of a program like GNW, was an experience I had not fully anticipated. It is one thing to know a place. It is another to encounter it as a student, with a cohort of peers from around the world, and through a discipline that reframes how you observe human behavior.

For anyone considering GNW, and for any ICS student considering IIMB in particular: go. The academic content is rigorous, the cohort is genuinely international, and the setting, a world-class campus in one of Asia’s most dynamic cities, is one that will give the experience a texture that a classroom in Tokyo simply cannot replicate. Come prepared to engage actively, as the sessions reward participation, and the in-class experiments are far more interesting when everyone is genuinely involved. Be prepared to be part of many surveys, lots of evidence gathering and real-time testing of conceptual understanding. And, if you get the chance to explore Bangalore beyond the campus, take it; as someone from the city I can attest that it has a lot to offer. The campus in particular is very beautiful, and many talented, enterprising students make up the IIMB student body, so it is definitely worth finding time for a chat over chai.

As I found, sometimes the most revelatory discoveries can still happen even in places you thought you already understood.