I became a behavioural economist because of this graph: It shows that happiness remained unchanged even as income doubled. The graph is from the US but the result replicates in other developed and middle-income countries. It was discovered by Richard Easterlin in 1974 and was dubbed the Easterlin Paradox about a decade later. Easterlin died
Author: davidcomerford
The Invisible College sounds great – a series of events in Cambridge on how to promote progress Apply to come to Invisible College – by Ben Southwood (worksinprogress.news) I also love the idea of a Science House – a residential base for people who want to spend a summer doing science for the sake of
Next Thursday Sam Enright, founder of the Edinburgh branch of the Effective Altruism movement, will be giving a talk titled “Low-Hanging Fruit in Global Health: Lessons from Lead Poisoning”. The talk is at 12.30 in 2b39 of the Cottrell Building. All welcome!
The Enlightenment ushered in a criterion for “knowing” rooted in replicable and externally verifiable evidence. Recently there has been a call to recognize other ways of knowing, those rooted in intuition, tradition, ritual etc. The validity of “other ways of knowing” is a source of debate. A ubiquitous example of where other ways of knowing
Football managers are too frequently fired when their teams underperform. That highlights a general bias to attribute credit / blame on the basis of realized outcomes. Because realized outcomes will to some extent be a function of luck, efficiency would recommend instead attributing credit and blame on the basis of process. The football manager example
You asked – we listened. By popular demand, here is the recording of our Workshop on Behavioural Science and Digital Markets Regulation that took place on the 20th of October, 2023 at the University of Stirling. The recording is split into three parts. Part 1 contains the following: Part 2 contains the following: Part 3
A reminder of the line up: 10:00–10:15: Welcome and introduction 10:15–11:00: Fiona Scott Morton (Yale) on “Why behavioral economics is critical to successful regulation of digital markets” 11:00–11:45: Philip Newall (Bristol) on “Dark nudges, dark patterns, and sludge in gambling“ 11:45–12:30: Stuart Mills (Leeds) on “Who is the average user in online choice environments?“ 12:30–13:30: Light lunch 13:30–14:15: Jonathan Porter (Ofcom) on “Testing behavioural approaches to improving safety
Inducing honest responses in discrete choice experiments using the choice matching approach The choice matching (CM) approach is a relatively new method that is meant to induce honest responses in any type of discrete choice question. A collection of three empirical papers that apply the CM to discrete choice experiments (DCEs) is presented. Two papers
On the first week of term, we are very excited about the new academic year. Developments on the MSc Behavioural Science We welcomed an enthusiastic group of new students to our MSc Behavioural Science on Monday who bring a diverse wealth of experience with them. This will be the first cohort to profit from our