Michael Best is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness. He is also Visiting Professor at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge. He is the author of 'The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring' (Polity Press and Harvard University Press, 1991) which has sold over 10,000 copies.

"Sugden is on a mission: to take off his pedestal that haloed figure of normative economics, the welfare planner. It's not any planner's business to nudge you away from supposed "psychological errors" and restore some putative rationality to your choices. Sugden is a true pioneer in the analysis of both the positive and the normative dimensions of behavioural economics. His book, which weaves together arguments from economics, philosophy and psychology, is provocative, engaging, and tightly argued. It poses a fundamental challenge, from a liberal perspective, to behavioural welfare economics, and it is a must-read for all social scientists." -- Marco Mariotti, Queen Mary's University of London