| Halo effect | A cognitive bias causes observers to form a positive opinion of an item based upon a limited set of positive traits. |
| Hammer price | The winning bid at an auction. Note that this does not include other fees (such as the buyer’s premium). |
| Hard sell | A forceful technique intended to strongly push a buyer into taking action. Such methods often involve limited-time offers or incentives. Overly forceful pitches risk irritating the potential customer. |
| Hardware | Computers and disks, tape drives, printers, and other gear that are plugged into computers. |
| Hawthorne Effect | A psychological phenomenon whereby people (customers) act differently when they are being studied. |
| Hedge finance | Financing is used by firms to fulfil contractual payment obligations using cashflow. Term coined by Hyman Minsky in his Financial Instability Hypothesis. See also: speculative finance. |
| Hedge funds | These investments are only open to professional investors, pension funds and insurance companies. They are considered risky bets although their aim is to beat falling markets. |
| Hedonic pricing | A method used to infer the economic value of unpriced environmental or perceptual qualities that affect the price of a marketed good. It allows a researcher to put a price on hard-to-quantify characteristics. Estimations are based on people’s revealed preferences, that is, the price they pay for one thing compared to another. |
| Hedonic treadmill | The human tendency to continuously adapt to a standard of living, such that increasing levels of wealth or comfort does not lead to permanent increases in happiness. |
| Hidden actions (problem of) | This occurs when some action taken by one party to an exchange is not known or cannot be verified by the other. For example, the employer cannot know (or cannot verify) how hard the worker she has employed is actually working. Also known as: moral hazard. See also: hidden attributes (problem of). |
| Hidden attributes (problem of) | This occurs when some attribute of the person engaging in an exchange (or the product or service being provided) is not known to the other parties. An example is that the individual purchasing health insurance knows her own health status, but the insurance company does not. Also known as: adverse selection. See also: hidden actions (problem of). |
| Hidden Layer | An group of internal nodes inside of a Neural Network which it uses to build a model. The less known about hidden layers by non statisticians, the better. |
| Holding costs | The penalty an entity experiences for maintaining ownership or control of as asset. For instance, many home owners are required to pay real estate taxes in order to maintain posession of their homes. |
| Horizontal merger | When two companies within the same industry and at the same stage in production merge together. |
| Hostile takeover | This is a takeover bid of a company that is deemed unacceptable or has unwelcome terms as deemed by the company’s board. |
| Hot commodity | An item for which there is extreme demand. The use of the word commodity in this context is the exact opposite of its normal use in economics. |
| House File | The organization’s own file of active and former customers. |
| House poor | The description of a person who spends (or has spent) a significant portion of his wealth on the purchase of his home. While the person may have a strong balance sheet, he generally few assets of value, other than his house. |
| Householding | A process in which all people and their accounts are grouped by the house that they live in so that they only get one letter per house in a promotion. |
| Human capital | The stock of knowledge, skills, behavioural attributes, and personal characteristics that determine the labour productivity or labour earnings of an individual. Investment in this through education, training, and socialization can increase the stock, and such investment is one of the sources of economic growth. Part of an individual’s endowments. See also: endowment. |
| Hyperglobalization | An extreme (and so far hypothetical) type of globalization in which there is virtually no barrier to the free flows of goods, services, and capital. See also: globalization. |
| Hyperinflation | This is inflation that is rapid or out of control. It usually only occurs during wars or during severe political instability. |
