2017 PhD Conference in Behavioural Science in Dublin

2017 PhD Conference in Behavioural Science 

Thursday, the 30th of November 2017

UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, Dublin

The UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy is pleased to announce our PhD Student Conference in Behavioural Science for 2017 in collaboration with the Stirling University Management School. This continues two successful annual events held at Stirling. For information about last year's PhD conference click here. The PhD conference will be held at University College Dublin on November 30th and will be followed by the 10th annual Irish economics and psychology conference on December 1st. Attendees to the PhD conference on November 30th are also welcome to attend the December 1 workshop. Please sign up separately for the workshop. Our keynote speakers will be Professor Don Ross (UCC) and Professor Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington (LSE).

Day Schedule (Thursday, November 30, 2017)

09:00-09:15: Registration

09:15-10:00: Welcome & Introductory Talk by Prof Liam Delaney

10:00-10:30: Coffee Break

10:30-11:30: Session 1

Session 1a: The environment

1. Victoria Taranu (Hasselt University) on "Experimental study on alternative information framings of the flemish energy performance certificate" (with Griet Verbeeck).

2. Vlada Pleshcheva (Humboldt University Berlin) on "Do consumers value qualitatively identical improvements in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of cars equally?"

Session 1b: Media use

3. Veelaiporn Promwichit (University of Edinburgh) on "Can social media sentiment predict futures returns?" (with Arman Eshraghi and Ronan Gallagher)

4. Kevin Momanyi (University of Aberdeen) on "An econometric analysis of the impact of telecare" (with Paul McNamee and Diane Skatun)

11:30-12:00: Coffee Break

12:00-13:00: Session 2

Session 2a: Locus of control

5. Juliane Hennecke (Free University Berlin) on "Controlled by politics? - Economic situation, locus of control and political participation"

6. Malte Preuss (Free University Berlin) on "Biased by success and failure: How unemployment shapes stated locus of control" (with Juliane Hennecke)

Session 2b: Decision Making 1

7. Luis Enrique Loria (University of Aberdeen) on "Current experience matters: Evidence from a reference dependent Discrete Choice Experiment design" (with Verity Watson, Takahiko Kiso, and Euan Phimister)

8. Mishal Ahmed (Georgia Institute of Technology) on "Quality provision with salient thinkers"

13:00-14:00: Lunch Break

14:00-15:30: Session 3

Session 3a: Mental Health and Work

9. Klavs Ciprikis (Dublin Institute of Technology) on "The impact of mental disorders on wages in the United Kingdom: An empirical analysis"

10. Victoria Mousteri (Stirling University) on "Hours-underemployment and psychological health: Evidence from Britain" (with Liam Delaney and Michael Daly)

11. Kate Isherwood (Bangor University) on “Looking forwards to work: Motivational and cognitive interventions to promote wellbeing, productivity and economic activity in the workforce.” (with John Parkinson, Gareth Harvey, and Andrew Goodman)

Session 3b: Decision Making 2

12. Abu Siddique (University of Southampton) on "Competitive preferences and ethnicity: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh" (with Michael Vlassopoulos)

13. Féidhlim McGowan (ESRI) on "Representation or reproduction? Lay understanding of probability distributions and willingness to take bets" (with Pete Lunn)

14. Terry McElvaney (ESRI) on “Complexity in car finance: Assessing limitations in consumer comprehension of personal contract plans (with Pete Lunn and Féidhlim McGowan)

15:30-16:00: Coffee Break

16:00-17:00: Session 4

Session 4a: Education

15. Caroline Wehner (Maastricht University and IZA) on "Personality and educational achievement: The role of emotional stability and conscientiousness" (with Trudie Schils)

16. Emmanuel Igwe (Greenwich University) on “A study on attitudes into postgraduate education” (with Gabriella Cagliesi and Denise Hawkes)

17. Kenneth Devine (Central Bank of Ireland) on "Risky Business: New Insights into Mortgage Choice and Risk Preferences."

Session 4b: Subjective Well-Being

18. Robert Murphy (Stirling and Department of Health) on "Does informing members of the general population of the impact of aspects of health on patients’ life satisfaction and day affect change their judgements of health?"

19. Rhi Willmot (Bangor University) on “The Role of Positive Psychology in Physical Wellbeing” (with John Parkinson) 

For questions, please contact Liam Delaney (liam.delaney@ucd.ie) or Leonhard Lades (leonhard.lades@ucd.ie)

Till Grüne-Yanoff public talk on behavioural economics and policy

Professor Till Grüne-Yanoff will deliver a public lecture to the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network on Wednesday 18th October at 6pm. There will be a wide-ranging Q+A session following the talk which will conclude at 7.30pm. The venue is the Royal Irish Academy. He will speak on behavioural economics and public policy, in particular on the role of policy in "boosting" ability to make good decisions under a variety of circumstances. The webpage to register for the event is available here.

Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions

Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Abstract
In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions.

Biography: 

Till Grüne-Yanoff is professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

His research focuses on the philosophy of science and on decision theory. In particular, he investigates the practice of modelling in science and engineering, develops formal models of preference consistency and preference change and discusses the evaluation of evidence in policy decision making. Click here for his Google Scholar page.

Till is editor of the journal Economics & Philosophy. He is also a member of the TINT Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Science in Helsinki, and a regular guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development.

He lives with his wife and his two children in the beautiful Vasastan neighborhood of Stockholm.

New Research Group Members

Delighted to welcome four new members of the research team. We will shortly advertise some more posts.

Welcome to Till Weber who joins us, having just submitted his PhD at Nottingham. Till will work with us for at least the next two years, including lecturing on the new MSc. His webpage is below and he will present an overview of his experimental research at a later session.  https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/people/till.weber

Welcome also to Leonhard Lades who joins EnvEcon and Geary for two years from the University of Stirling. Leo will also give some lectures on the MSc. He has published a number of papers on intertemporal choice, consumption, ethical aspects of nudging, and a variety of other topics. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3SQTAFQAAAAJ&hl=en

While he has been here a while on another project, I am also glad to formally welcome Michael Daly, also from Stirling, who starts his 2 year Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship here in the next couple of weeks. Michael is Associate Professor at Stirling and has published extensively in economic psychology, health psychology, behavioural change and cognate areas. https://www.michaeldalyresearch.com/

Tadgh Hegarty has also started with us, and will conduct a PhD at the intersection of behavioural economics and machine learning, examining the nature and extent of behavioural biases in gambling decisions.

Wednesday Weekly Sessions

We host a weekly session from 930am to 1030am on Wednesday mornings to bring our researchers and students together with external stakeholders interested in this area. As well as knowledge exchange, we also hope that students will be encouraged to apply some of their material to direct policy questions. Below is current schedule. We welcome expressions of interest.

27th September: Simon Rafferty (EPA) "Behavioural Economics and Environmental Policy" and Patricia Harris (HSA): "Reducing Work Accidents in Ireland"

4th October: Clare Delargy (BIT): "Behavioural Insights Team and Public Policy".

11th October: Aine Lyng and Ronan Murphy (NCCP): "Cancer Prevention"

18th October: Cathal Fitzgerald (DETI): "Brexit and Firm Decision Making; Behavioural Economics of Innovation".

25th October: Till Weber (Nottingham): "Experimental Methods and Behavioural Economics".

1st November: Leonhard Lades (UCD and EnvEcon): "Naturalistic Monitoring of Human Preferences and Behaviour".

8th November: Michael Daly (UCD and Stirling): "Self-control and Health".

15 November: Orla Doyle (UCD): "Behavioural Economics and Early Childhood Intervention".

22nd November:

Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship 2018

The deadline for these scholarships is November 1st. We are certainly open to speaking to MSc students interested in applying for PhD funding to conduct research in our research group. Full details are available here They are open to EU nationals living outside of Ireland and other resident categories set out in their terms and conditions to apply to take their PhD in an Irish university. 

Glenn W. Harrison Friday 13th October 1230pm to 2pm

Professor Glenn Harrison comes to Dublin on October 13th and will give a public lecture on Behavioral Welfare Economics. Professor Harrison is one of the leading researchers in econometrics and experimental economics. I can also say from experience that he is an engaging speaker with a wide range of intellectual interests. He has agreed to give a talk that will be accessible to a broad audience interested in behavioural economics. His bio is below and website is here. The talk will take place from 1230pm to 2pm at the Institute of Banking Building near the IFSC. There is no charge for registering but we ask people to register in advance on this link as space is limited and the building is secured. 

Glenn Harrison is the C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR) in the Department of Risk Management & Insurance, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He has more than 185 academic publications, including general journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Economic Journal, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and American Journal of Public Health, and specialist journals such as Journal of Environmental Economics & Management, Land Economics, Natural Resources Journal, Journal of Law & Economics, Experimental Economics, and Economics & Philosophy. His research interests include experimental economics, law and economics, international trade policy and environmental policy. 

His work in experimental economics has included the study of bidding behavior in auctions, market contestability and regulation, bargaining behavior, and the elicitation of risk and time preferences. Most recently it has examined the complementarity of laboratory and field experiments. His work in law and economics has centered on the calculation of compensatory damages in tobacco litigation, including testifying for plaintiffs in the Medicaid litigation that resulted in a settlement worth more than $200 billion. Most recently he has worked on the relationship between compensatory and punitive damages, and class actions involving the excessive promotion of certain drugs. His work in international trade policy has employed computable general equilibrium models to quantify the effects of unilateral, regional and multilateral trade reforms. A particular focus of this policy analysis has been to assess the effects of trade reform on poor households in developing countries. His work in environ mental economics has included modeling the effects of alternative policies to mitigate global warming, critiques of casual applications of the contingent valuation method, and improved methods of damage assessment. Most recently he has focused on the formal characterization of environmental reform as a “policy lottery” that properly reflects uncertainty in predicted effects on households. 

Professor Harrison has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and private bodies. These include the World Bank (evaluating trade policy reforms for developing countries), the Swedish government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (evaluating carbon tax proposals), the Danish government (evaluating tax and deregulation policies), and counsel representing parties suing tobacco companies and drug companies for economic damages. Professor Harrison is a Pisces, and loves red wine, one Swedish woman, and one American daughter. Before academic life, Professor Harrison played Australian “no-rules” football for Hawthorn in the Australian Football League, kicking one goal in his career.

Irish Postgraduate and Early Career Conference 2018

From 2001 to 2013, we held eleven workshops in Ireland for postgraduate and early career researchers. They started as exclusively aimed at Irish-based researchers and eventually morphed into international events. The events were run mostly by PhD students in the Universities, including events hosted by UCD, TCD, Limerick, Cork, and Galway. In Scotland, 8 universities combine on PhD training and host an annual event for PhD students. Such events provide students and researchers an opportunity to discuss their work outside their own institution and meet other researchers and faculty.

To restart this effort, we will host a full-day event in Dublin on January 19th. The event is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers across the Irish universities. A full call for papers with details of submissions will be released soon. The event will take the form of thematic sessions with ideally at least some faculty discussant input at each session, along with keynote talks, and engagement with policy and industry. We welcome submissions from PhD students and early career researchers in institutions on the island of Ireland.

I would welcome suggestions from students, researchers, and faculty about how to make this a feature of the Irish research environment. Some questions include whether it should be a student-run event in future years, links to the Irish Economics Association, venues, format of sessions, whether it should be restricted to national institutions, whether there should be job-market aspects etc., I hope revamping these sessions will also create an opportunity to discuss collaboration on advanced training in Economics across the country.