Date: Thursday 9th November 2023 Time: 18:15 - 19:30 GMT
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE (map) - please note venue change
Speaker: Andrei Shleifer (Harvard)
Chair: Camille Landais (STICERD/LSE)
Video
Human choices are often unstable, dependent on normatively irrelevant features of the problem, and variable across people in similar situations. Standard economics resolves these challenges by constructing exotic preferences. Behavioural economics deals with them by proliferating biases. Neither unifies different phenomena effectively.
An alternative strategy is to start with regularities of human cognition, such as perception, attention, and memory, and to derive how people represent problems, form beliefs, and make choices from those foundations. This approach unifies theoretically a broad range of puzzling findings, and incorporates new strategies of measurement and prediction. We illustrate the ideas of cognitive economics with examples of finance, macroeconomics, labour economics, political economy, and risk assessment using both experimental and field data.
Andrei Shleifer is John L Loeb Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He has worked in the areas of comparative corporate governance, law and finance, behavioural finance, as well as institutional economics. He has published seven books and is an Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Finance Association. Shleifer is a previous winner of the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association. According to RePEc, Shleifer is the most cited economist in the world.
Camille Landais is Professor of Economics and director of STICERD, LSE.
This is a STICERD Atkinson Lecture co-hosted by STICERED and FMG.
