Panel on Behavioural Ecomics

George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1985 and since then has held academic positions at The University of Chicago, visiting professor positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Arctic University of Norway (in Tromsø, Norway), the BRIQ Institute on Behavior and Inequality at the University of Bonn, Germany, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, The Russell Sage Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin.  He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on applications of psychology to economics and, more recently, applications of economics to psychology (e.g., economic analyses of boredom, insecure self-esteem, and of the reluctance to thank and apologize). Specific interests include belief-based utility, the psychology and economics of attention, learning and forgetting, motivational feeling states associated with cognition (e.g., boredom, curiosity and mental effort), intertemporal choice, bargaining and negotiations, psychology and health, law and economics, the psychology of adaptation, the role of emotion in decision making, the psychology of curiosity, conflict of interest, various aspects of sex, unethical behavior, and issues involving research ethics. Loewenstein helped to found the field of behavioral economics, the field of neuroeconomics, and was one of the early proponents of a new approach to public policy called, variously, ‘asymmetric’ or ‘libertarian’ paternalism. He has published over 300 journal articles in journals in economics, psychology, law, medicine and other fields, numerous book chapters, has written or edited 6 books on topics ranging from intertemporal choice to behavioral economics and emotions, and has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals in different fields. His CV is organized by topic area, and you can access his publications on Google Scholar.

Drazen Prelec is the Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and a Professor of Management Science and Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has been a member of the Sloan faculty since 1991, with secondary appointments in the MIT Departments of Economics, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his Ph. D in Experimental Psychology and AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He became involved with behavioral economics as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has pursued this interest with fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and All Souls College, Oxford. He has also held visiting professor positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Mathematics Department at Zagreb University.

Prelec remains interested in the limitations of rational models for human agency, especially in connection with non-causal motivation, self-signaling, and collective choice (the free-rider problem). However, most of his work over the past decade has focused on ‘crowd wisdom’ in non-verifiable knowledge domains, i.e., domains where no external truth criterion is available. Examples are long-range forecasts, political or historical inferences, and artistic or legal interpretations. He has developed incentive-compatible algorithms (“Bayesian truth serum”) that provide honesty incentives without need for external verification, and that can help identify truth even when majority opinion is wrong. Most recently, he has attempted to extend these mechanisms to computational neuroscience, as part of a larger ‘neural game theory’ project.

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