Economics Psychology Conference

Thanks to everyone who showed up at the conference yesterday. It was a brilliant day and exactly why it is great to work as an academic. There was a lot of really terrific ideas and huge potential for development, further interactions and debate.

Thanks to Emma Barron who ran things, and to Karl Deeter for recording the talks. I will post some of these talks on the blog over the next few weeks.

The basic aims of the conference were to:

- bring together people working at the interface of economics, psychology and neuroscience nationally
- showcase existing labs and infrastructure nationally
- provide a platform for PhD students working in the area
- develop interaction between different sectors to help expand the range of applications
- highlight models of international best practice

Michael Daly was the first speaker, on morningness and cortisol, followed by David Comerford on expenditure measurement, Martin Ryan on subjective labour market skills matching and then Mirko Miro on environment and well-being. The second session started with Jonathan Murphy on the neuroeconomics of time discounting, followed by Pete Lunn on loss aversion and Stephen Kinsella on experimental auctions to price electricity. Marcel Das, Director of Centerdata in Tilburg outlined the LISS panel, which is one of the best resource globally for social scientists (post to follow). Katherine Carman, also of Tilburg, presented on health risk perception and preventive health. Gerard O'Neill, Director of Amarach research outlined his monthly surveys on well-being and expectations and in particular examined the effects of day of the week on well-being. The keynote speaker Arie Kapteyn gave a wide ranging discussion of the determinants of life satisfaction in different domains, examining issues such as how different domains are weighted, how to measure life satisfaction, how to compare scores across countries and the implications of the findings for how we think about economic growth.

I hope people will keep in touch and I could already see a lot of interesting discussions happening after the sessions. We will begin organising an event for next year quite soon. It will be in November once again, and likely in Dublin or Maynooth. I already have a lot of ideas for how to develop this session. I am certain though after yesterday that it has a place and is worth continuing.