Book and Journal Clubs: Suggestions welcome

We will be getting this back again quite shortly. We have been running offline journal clubs but an online version makes sense. As the heading says..suggestions welcome! But I will send a couple of starting topics shortly. 

Overview 

We are currently running a virtual book club and seminar series aimed at PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty associated with the behavioural work in Geary and Stirling. If you would like to be included and haven't already been emailed, please let me know. Due to technology constraints, spaces are very limited so will not at present be able to make them more widely available though if you are a loyal reader working in this space and want to be involved let me know by email and we can try to accommodate. For students interested in this and related topics, see details of our MSc in Behavioural Science which is currently taking applications.

Schedule:

2015:

Friday February 20th 2pm: "Early Childhood Investments Substantially Boost Adult Health" Liam Delaney

2013:

Monday May 13th 11.30am: "Time to Cook: Expenditure at Retirement in Spain" Bernardo Fonsecas Nunes

Monday April 8th 11.30am: "Taxonomies of Behavioural Change Techniques" Michael Daly

Monday February 25th 11.30am: "Financial incentives to quit smoking". Liam Delaney

Monday February 4th 12pm:  "Using Google Trends Data to Study Economic Events & Mental Health". Michael Daly.

2012:

Monday November 5th 2pm: "Conti and Heckman: The Economics of Child Well-Being". Liam Delaney

Monday October 15th 2pm: "Comparing Day Reconstruction and Experience Sampling: Recent Papers". Michael Daly.

Thursday June 28th 2pm: "Cass Sunstein Empirically Informed Regulation". Liam Delaney

Friday June 22nd 2pm "Ed Glaeser Triumph of the City" Clare Delargy

Monday June 11th 2pm "Hasler, G. (2012). Can the neuroeconomics revolution revolutionize psychiatry?Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36, 64-78 " Summary here

Friday May 18th 2pm: "Stability and change in personality over the lifecourse". List of papers and summary here. Michael Daly.

Friday May 11th 2pm: Journal summary of papers on genoeconomics. List of papers here. Michael Daly.

Friday May 4th 2pm: Journal summary on papers in personality and economics. List of papers here. Liam Delaney.

Friday April 27th 2pm: Journal club on two papers: "Influencing Behaviour the Mindspace Way" and "The behavioural change wheel: A new method for characterising behavioural change and interventions". Michael Daly.

Friday 13th April 2pm: Journal club on two papers: "What People Desire, Feel Conflicted About, and Try to Resist in Everyday Life"; and "Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study of Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control". Michael Daly.

Monday 2nd April 2pm: "Book Club on Ainslie, Breakdown of Will". Liam Delaney.

Friday 9th March 3pm: "Book Club on Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow". Clare Delargy.

Suggestions:

Singer's "The life you can save"
Heckman on life-span development
Psychology's Ghosts (book review in WSJ here)
Handbook of Self-Control
Howard Rachlin on self-control  (e.g. classic article here)
Papers on culture and financial decision-making
Jon Elster "Nuts and Bolts for Social Sciences"
Baumeister new book on Willpower (link here )
Ariely upside of irrationality ( link here )
Dan Gilbert Stumbling on Happiness (link here )
Hershfield, H., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self. Journal of Marketing Research, XLVIII(November), S23-S37.

"Embodied economics: how bodily information shapes the social coordination dynamics of decision-making"

Book Clubs

Starting in mid-January, the following is a partial list of some of the books I want to cover in the next few months if people are interested in sparing a few hours off-campus. Recent sessions included Theory of Justice, Animal Spirits, The Politics, Theory of Moral Sentiments and Nudge. Michael Collins in TCD got me into the habit of doing these and they have been a fantastic source of intellectual inspiration over the last few years. Sessions have ranged from two people to 20, but it is really immaterial how many people actually attend. It is also irrelevant whether everyone has read the book being discussed. It is important that one person has read it carefully to moderate things (feel free to volunteer but am more than happy to cover the ones listed below).

1. Robert Nozick is practically a household name due to Anarchy, State and Utopia and I would like to cover this, given that Theory of Justice was covered previously. However, a book that has substantial relevance to our discussions and research here is the 1993 work "The Nature of Rationality". The wiki description is here Among other things, the work contains novel solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, discussions of how principles can reduce discounting and enable life-time utility maximisation, ideas on the adapability of incorporating sunk costs and a substantial number of other ideas.

2. Hayek "The Road to Serfdom". A shame we have not yet covered this. Various versions available through the links on the wiki page. I will get a copy of the definitive version. Readers digest version here

3. Jon Elster's books have been a revelation to me over the years. Brilliantly lucid discussions of core issues at the intersection of economics, philosophy and psychology. His work on emotions and self-restraint are particularly interesting to behavioural economics. His classic work Ulysses and The Sirens is one of the most cited books in behavioural economics and completely gripping.

4. Robert Putnam. "Bowling Alone". Again, already a classic work that placed the concept of Social Capital on the agenda of many national and international policy agencies. My copy currently rests somewhere in the North of Ireland, as I gave it to a football manager a few years back after giving a talk on sport and social capital to the Ulster GAA association, in between talks by the President of the GAA and the DUP Minister for Sport. The book has received a lot of attention in Ireland over the years and it still has a strong life in current debates.