Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Behavioural Economics Reading Group

We are going to do a few things during the year to make the reading group format more lively. Pretty soon, the current group are going to give a mini-presentation on their ideas and i will keep people posted on this. I would also like to have a session at the ISNE based on this. The scope of the group is mostly behavioural economics but also extending to "non-behavioural" aspects of economic psychology like explaining suicide rates by macrostructural factors. Feel free to come along to one of these.

In the last session we discussed the following

Suicide:
How do we causally assess the influence of large scale expenditure programmes designed to alleviate suicide? Do they really reduce suicide or do they come precisely as society develops an awareness of the problem and has begun to adjust in other ways also?

Life Expectancy:
We talked about whether it would be possible to examine the extent to which preference parameters such as time preferences are conditioned by long run changes in life expectancy brought about by technological changes.

Information Seeking:
We talked about the exploratory phase of the Iowa Gambling task and various models that have been put forward to explain behaviour here. In a later session, there is going to be a demonstration of this task and the implications of different models.

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