Behavioural Economics and Social Marketing

A list of resources we had put together before is available here. We are having some internal sessions on the overlap between these two areas. The interaction of disciplines such as health psychology, social marketing, behavioural economics, game theory and related areas is a paramount concern for policy in many areas and is a big feature of the work we are trying to develop at the research centre. Suggestions for discussion of this research welcome by emailing me.

Weekend Blog Links

First set of weekend links for a while. Our research center in Stirling is currently developing very rapidly with a number of new programmes, PhD students, research fellows and faculty either having joined or in the process of joining. This blog is currently receiving over 1,000 hits per day and we very much welcome suggestions from readers, colleagues and collaborators about posts. Suggestions for journal sessions also welcome - current list here. 

1. Vacancy for Early Career Fellowship in Behavioural Science at our research group - 3 year post.

2. Stirling Santander Behavioural Science MSc Studentships. Need to have applied also for the programme. The deadline is June 12th.

3. From a while back, Paul Dolan on using happiness to value health (h/t @Mikey3982 on twitter)

4. New journal Behavioral Science and Policy fills a massive gap

5. New blog launched by David Bell and colleagues on economic/policy of constitutional change in Scotland

6. Big result in health economics that personality does not explain social gradient in health countered in new JHE paper 

7. UK version of the Australian conversation website. Any readers of this blog with policy-relevant academic work should consider this as a potential outlet.

8. Vacancy for senior lecturer/reader in Economics University of Stirling.

9. Kevin Denny has a nice page of behavioural economics resources.

10. Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering

New outlet for Behavioural Science Research

BPS: Behavioral Science and Policy

The Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA) is a newly founded organization whose mission is to promote translation of rigorous behavioral science research into concrete policy solutions that serve the public interest. A major activity of the association will be to coordinate publication of a new journal, BSP Behavioral Science & Policy. BSP will include short articles advancing public and private policy proposals and recommendations from leading behavioral scientists. All articles are designed to be both scientifically rigorous and accessible to a general audience.

More details on the journal are available here:

http://www.behavioralpolicy.org/bsp-flyer.pdf

Early Career Fellow Behavioural Science Center Stirling Management School

Job number:

SCH00221

Location:

Stirling Campus

Contract Type:

Fixed Term Contract

Posting date:

21-May-2013

Post Details

Full time, 3 year Fixed Term Contract
Grade 7 £30,424 - £36,298
Closing date is midnight on 19 June 2013
Interviews will be held in mid July 2013.

The Post

The Stirling Management School is seeking to appoint an outstanding Early Career Fellow. The Fellow will work with Professor Liam Delaney and Professor Alex Wood to develop the activities of the Behavioural Science Centre in the School of Management. The post is on a fixed term, full-time basis for three years from 1 September 2013. The successful candidate will be substantially supported to work with top researchers and develop their academic career. The Early Career Fellow post is intended to help the recipient to develop into an independent researcher by the end of their 3 year fixed-term contract.

The University

Stirling was the first new university to be established in Scotland for nearly 400 years, created by Royal Charter in 1967. Since its foundation, the University has embraced its role as an innovative, intellectual and cultural institution with an established reputation for blending arts and science.

Stirling is a University of distinction, home to leading researchers and scholars attracted by the unique learning environment, exceptional facilities and student-centred approach, where ability, not background, is recognised and valued.

The essence of the University of Stirling is its people: graduates, staff and students are helping to shape the world by making a direct and positive contribution to the development of prosperous, healthy and sustainable communities around the globe.

The University population has grown from 164 undergraduate students and 31 postgraduates in 1967 to 8,800 undergraduates and 3,500 postgraduates in 2012. With over 100 nationalities represented at Stirling, around one in five students come from overseas.

A truly Scottish university, Stirling’s reach extends to campuses in the Highland capital of Inverness and to Stornoway, gateway to the Western Isles.

Stirling’s main campus is located at the historic heart of Scotland, with convenient links to the rest of the UK and beyond. The University is within easy reach of Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, and its largest city, Glasgow. Scotland’s two main international airports are less than an hour away, with direct flights to Europe and beyond.

About Us

STIRLING MANAGEMENT SCHOOL - Managing to make a difference ...

At Stirling Management School we believe that management matters. Management is a process involved in all forms of human activity; from an individual managing their own time, to a large corporation managing their finances. We are interested not only in the practices and processes of managing business and society but the short and long-term outcomes that impact on people’s lives and the communities in which they live.

Our research interrogates all aspects of management, sheds new light on established ways of doing things and finds new and creative ways of managing. For example; managing for equality, managing for economic prosperity, managing quality service provision, managing the nation’s health, managing the environment, managing and protecting privacy and human rights, managing behaviour in and out of organisations, managing labour markets, managing emerging economies, all can be recognised…

Our philosophy, that effective management can make a positive difference, means we get to the heart of what is involved in the management and organisation of a diverse range of activities. Our research, teaching and knowledge exchange activities create significant and lasting impact on people’s everyday lives, through our involvement with, and influence on, large and small businesses, public policy, and local and global communities. In everything we do we endeavour to create insightful analysis that leads to effective intervention.

Research at Stirling Management School is known for being creative, bold and distinctive in its challenge to current orthodoxies and in finding new ways to address a range of organisational and societal dilemmas. Stirling Management School is recognised as a centre of academic excellence that offers innovative scholarship and widespread engagement with a variety of stakeholders to improve business, society and lives. The research carried out in the School creates lasting impact through its contribution to academic debates, public policy and management practice.

Research activity covers a range of important contemporary issues which include corporate governance, as well as energy and environmental economics; labour economics; regional and urban economics; and a focus on work and working lives in a range of profit and non-profit organisations and different sectors; including, for example, the creative and financial industries and public health.

We are also leaders in retail planning policy, town centre and place regeneration and community retail enterprises. We have significant strengths in consumer marketing as well as social marketing research, specifically tobacco control, alcohol policy, health marketing, branding and packaging of harmful products, social campaign effectiveness.

We lead strong research networks in privacy and surveillance; social identity and professions; gender, work and management and healthcare management. New expertise is recently added to the School - notably in strategy, enterprise and innovation; leadership and change; creativity; business ethics; behavioural science, socio-economic development; social enterprise; and moral economy and human flourishing.

Areas of critical mass are highlighted in research centres where highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary research focuses on: Behavioural Science; Consumers, Cultures and Society; Information Surveillance and Privacy; and Tobacco Control.

A vital part of our research collective is a vibrant doctoral community with almost 80 research students attached to the School.

Our aim is to continually seek effective ways of managing the world’s resources so as to improve business, society and lives through academic excellence. Join us in this endeavour...

Description of Duties

The successful candidate will work with the Directors of the Behavioural Science centre Professor Liam Delaney and Professor Alex Wood to develop the activities of the centre. We will also work with the successful candidate to ensure that their own research is developed. Duties will include:

Assisting in the development of funding proposals.

A minority of time spent on administrative tasks such as populating the centre website, helping to organise workshops and seminars, helping run the MSc, and assisting Professors Delaney and Wood with the routine running of the centre.

Production of high quality publications in peer reviewed journals.

Essential/Desirable Criteria

Please see attached additional information.

 

Additional Information

For further information on this post inlcuding the Essential and Desirable criteria, please see the attached additional information.

Informal enquiries should be addressed to Professor Liam Delaney (email liam.delaney@stir.ac.uk tel: 01786 467278).

Please find details of current staff, publications, research projects of the behavioural science centre on the following website:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/management/research/behavioural-science-centre/

An applicant guide can be found at the following address we recommend you read this before making your application http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/pdf/applicant-guide_v2.pdf.

Available documents

• Early Career Fellow in Behavioural Science

Personality and the education–health gradient

Personality and the education–health gradient: A note on “Understanding differences in health behaviors by education”

Gabriella Conti, Christopher Hansman, Journal of Health Economics, Volume 32, Issue 2, March 2013, Pages 480–485  

Abstract

We test the robustness of the results of Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2010) on the role of personality in explaining the education–health gradient by using alternative measures of child personality available in the National Child Development Study. We show that, alternatively to the authors, conclusions, personality contributes to the education–health gradient to an extent nearly as large as that of cognition.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762961200094X

Behavioural Economics for Kids

Thanks to Dilip Soman on twitter for pointing out this gem.

Santander Behavioural Science Scholarship

Santander Behavioural Science Scholarship

Level: Postgraduate (Taught)

School: Stirling Graduate School

Availability: Applicants who are permanently resident in the following countries may apply: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Russia, UK, Uruguay, USA.

Applicants must hold, or expect to obtain an offer or an unconditional offer of a place to study the MSc Behavioural Science.

Number of awards: 2 awards available for courses commencing in 2013

Value:  £5000 per annum for 1 year.

Deadline:  The closing date for receipt of scholarship applications is 12 June 2013

School contact: sgs@stir.ac.uk

• Apply now

European Competition and Consumer Day

Am involved in the following session in Dublin next Friday - a very interesting area where behavioural economics has become increasingly relevant. 

European Competition and Consumer Day

Competition Policy and Consumer Protection: Challenges and Choices

24 May 2013, Dublin CastleAs part of Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2013 the Competition Authority and the National Consumer Agency are jointly hosting a one day conference in Dublin Castle on 24 May 2013. This timely programme will feature perspectives from leading authorities on issues central to the protection of consumers through competition enforcement and consumer protection. It will be opened by Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mr Richard Bruton, TD.

PLEASE NOTE: registration for this event is now closed.

Registration and coffee (8.30am to 9.00am)

Welcome (9.00am to 9.10am)
Mr Patrick Kenny, Acting Chairperson, The Competition Authority, Ireland

Minister's Address (9.10am to 9.30am)
Mr Richard Bruton TD, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Ireland

Session 1: Key Note Speeches: Critical Issues for Consumer Protection and Competition Policy (9.00am to 10.30am)

Chair: Ms Karen O'Leary, Chief Executive, National Consumer Agency, Ireland
Mr Tonio Borg, EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy
Dr Alexander Italianer, Director General Competition Policy, European Commission

Session 2: Interaction of Competition Policy and Consumer Protection - Panel Discussion (10.50am to 12.15pm)

Moderator: Professor Alex Schuster, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Mr Philip Collins, Chairman of the Office of Fair Trading, UK
Mr Chris Fonteijn, Chairman of the Authority for Consumers & Markets, Netherlands
Ms Agnete Gersing, Director General of the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority, Denmark
Ms Edith Ramirez, Chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, USA

Lunch (12:15pm)


Session 3: Collective Redress (13.05pm to 14.50pm)

Moderator: Ms Joanne Blennerhassett, College Lecturer in the School of Law, University College Dublin, Ireland
Professor Christopher Hodges, Head of the CMS/Swiss Re Research Programme on Civil Justice Systems, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford and Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
Professor Rachael Mulheron, Professor of Law, Queen Mary University of London and Council Member of the Civil Justice Council of England and Wales, UK
Mr Eddy De Smijter, Private Enforcement Unit, DG Competition, European Commission

Session 4: Behavioural Economics: Consumers’ Use of Information and Decision Making (15.10pm to 16.40pm)

Moderator: Professor Liam Delaney, University of Stirling, UK
Dr Pete Lunn, Economic and Social Research Institute, Ireland
Mr Bernard Sheridan, Director of Consumer Protection, Central Bank of Ireland, Ireland
Professor Maurice Stucke, University of Tennessee College of Law, USA

Closing remarks (16.40pm to 16.50pm)
Ms Karen O'Leary, Chief Executive, National Consumer Agency, Ireland

PhD Studentship University of Exeter

(via Michael) The Department of Economics at Exeter University, in conjunction with the medical school, are advertising the following fully funded phd studentships.

Re: PhD funding opportunities at Exeter University

We are looking to recruit a high quality PhD student to a fully funded PhD studentship in Health Economics. The student will receive support and supervision from the Health Economics Group at Exeter University and the Department of Economics at Exeter University.

Please click on the link below to see more details of this studentship and how to apply (deadline for applications is 7th June 2013):

Decision-making under risk: investigating preferences in a health care setting Ref: 1227

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/index.php?id=1227


Dr Anne Spencer

Associate Professor

Research Post: UCD Geary Institute

Research Post: UCD Geary Institute

The Early Childhood Research team in the UCD Geary Institute is seeking applications from motivated individuals with an interest in child development and developmental psychology to become the Preparing for Life (PFL) Research Coordinator starting June 2013. The post is initially for 7 months and may be extended for 2 years. The salary scale is €33,950 - €41,500 per annum. Candidates should have a PhD in psychology and experience working within and/or managing a research team and evidence of academic output. Preparing for Life is a 5-year school readiness intervention operating in disadvantaged areas of North Dublin. The Geary team is conducting an impact and process evaluation to assess the overall effectiveness of this programme which works with parents from the beginning of pregnancy until their children start school. The impact evaluation is being conducted using a longitudinal experimental design and collects data on parents, the home environment, and child development outcomes from birth through age 5. As a researcher on this project, you will engage with an international and interdisciplinary research team including Nobel laureate Professor James Heckman and world leading developmental psychologist, Professor Richard Tremblay, to conduct one of the first studies of this nature in Ireland.

The deadline for the post is May 19th and applications may be made through the UCD websitehttp://www.ucd.ie/hr/jobvacancies/ (search for post number 005866).

Links and Notes from April 17th Whitaker Institute Talk on Well-Being

I gave a talk recently at the Whitaker Institute in NUI Galway (slides here). It was a well-attended session with people from several disciplines and there was a good debate during and afterwards about the usefulness of such indices.

I promised to send some links related to the talk. Below is not exhaustive and am happy to add further material if there are specific questions or suggestion.

General treatments of well-being:

Richard Layard's well-known book on happiness is a good introduction.

Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress

The work of Ed Diener includes many journal and book summaries of the state of knowledge on subjective well-being. (see also work of people like David Blanchflower, Andrew Oswald, Bernard Van Praag, Alois Stutzer, Andrew Clark).

Literature referenced during the talk: 

Cormac O'Grada's paper on the five Irish economic crises is a great backdrop for the discussion.

Walsh (2012) Adjusting to the crisis: well–being and economic conditions in Ireland

Carol Newman & Liam Delaney & Brian Nolan, 2008. "A Dynamic Model of the Relationship Between Income and Financial Satisfaction: Evidence from Ireland," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 39(2), pages 105-130.

The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Christopher K. Hsee, Yang Yang, Naihe Li, Luxi Shen (2009). Wealth, Warmth, and Well-Being: Whether Happiness Is Relative or Absolute Depends on Whether It Is About Money, Acquisition, or Consumption. Journal of Marketing Research: Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 396-409.

Delaney, Fernihough and Smith (2013 forthcoming in Demography) "Exporting Poor Health: The Irish in England". WP version here.

Gary King's webpage on anchoring vignettes provides a wealth of information on this approach.

A new working paper by Wolfers, Stephenson and Sacks summarises their take on the debate with Easterlin  (see Easterlin's recent publications for the alternative view).

Well-Being Indices:

ONS National Well-Being page 

UN Human Development Index 

Canadian Index of Well-Being

New Economic Foundation Well-Being Indices 

OECD Your Better Life Index 

United Nationals World Happiness Report 

Data relevant to Ireland: 

The five rounds of the European Social Survey provide a substantial data-sets for people interested in comparing well-being across Europe between 2002 and 2010.

The Irish Social Science Data Archive contains several data-sets with well-being information for Ireland. The Living in Ireland surveys are a very important resource. Subjective data in EU-SILC is, unfortunately, very limited.

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is an important source of data on the aging population in Europe.

Gallup World Poll is a major global data-set that includes Ireland.

The Eurobarometer contains data on life satisfaction dating back to the early 1970s.

University of Stirling Postgraduate Merit Scholarship

The University of Stirling is offering any UK or European Union student with a First Class Honours degree (or equivalent) a £2,000 scholarship to study full-time on any taught Masters course or £1,000 for part-time study. It is not available to students studying postgraduate certificates, diplomas or modules. This scholarship will be awarded in two instalments at the end of each of Semester.

To be considered, you must forward on a copy of your degree certificate and academic transcript when available tograduate.admissions@stir.ac.uk

Your eligibility will be verified after enrolment and you will be contacted with further details, through your University email address.

Please note that award of this scholarship cannot be combined with any other scholarship or the taught postgraduate fee waiver award. This award is only available to students who are paying the full course fee.

Santander Master’s Scholarship (Includes MSc Behavioural Science)

Santander Master’s Scholarship

Level: Postgraduate (Taught)

School: Stirling Graduate School

Availability: Applicants who are permanently resident in the following countries may apply: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Russia, UK, Uruguay, USA. 

Applicants must hold, or expect to obtain an offer or an unconditional offer of a place to study one of the following Masters Programmes for entry in September 2013: Behavioural Science, Business and Management, International Accounting & Finance, Investment Analysis, Banking and Finance, Human Resource Management and Socio-Economic Development, International Business, International Business & Socio Economic Development, Energy Management, Environmental Economics, Finance, Human Resource Management, Management, Marketing, MBA, MBA Social Marketing and Behaviour Change, MBA in Social Marketing and Retail Management, Retail Management.

Number of awards: 8 awards available for courses commencing in 2013

Value:  £5000 per annum for 1 year.

Deadline:  31 May 2013

School contact: sgs@stir.ac.uk

• Information sheet
• Apply now

MSc in Behavioural Science Scholarship

MSc in Behavioural Science Scholarship

Level:  Taught Postgraduate

School:  Stirling Management School

Availability: Applications from students in the United Kingdom, Europe, India, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America will be considered.  Students must hold, or expect to obtain an offer or an unconditional offer of a place on the full time MSc in Behavioural Science for entry in September 2013. Applications may be submitted for the Scholarship along with the course application, but only those obtaining and accepting a place on the course will be entered into the Scholarship competition.

Number of awards:  1

Value:  A NEW Scholarship, with a value of £2500 will be awarded to students who wish to study the NEW MSc in Behavioural Science offered by the Stirling Management School.

Deadline:  The closing date for receipt of scholarship applications is the 12^th June 2013. Successful students will be notified of the outcome via email in July 2013. 

How to apply

Complete the SMS Scholarship application form, and provide a 1000 word statement/essay on the following:

• why you are applying for these Scholarships
• why a Scholarship would help you
• which modules of the MSc are of particular interest to you and why
• what your expectations are in terms of learning outcomes
• what would you like to be able to do and achieve as a result of successful completion of the course; your educational or professional aims for the five years after you complete the course.

School contact: Please email completed applications and statements to: sism@stir.ac.uk