How Humans Behave: Implications for Economics and Economic Policy
Conference Series
48
June
2003
Editors: Richard
W. Kopcke, Jane
Sneddon Little, and Geoffrey
M.B. Tootell
Conference Overview and Agenda
Participants' Biographies
Henry J. Aaron is Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in the Economics Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He joined Brookings in 1968 as a Senior Fellow and was Director of the Economics Studies Program from 1990 through 1996. While at Brookings, Aaron also taught at the University of Maryland. He served for two years as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and chaired the 1979 Advisory Council on Social Security. A recent book by Aaron is The Plight of Academic Medical Centers. He has also co-authored Countdown to Reform: The Great Social Security Debate and co-edited Setting National Priorities: The Year 2000 and Beyond. Aaron holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and completed his undergraduate work at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Katharine G. Abraham is Professor of Survey Methodology and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1993 through 2001, she served as Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. She is co-author of the book Job Security in America: Lessons from Germany; co-editor of the book New Developments in the Labor Market: Toward a New Institutional Paradigm; and contributor of numerous articles to professional journals and edited collections. Prior to her tenure with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, she held faculty appointments in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Abraham holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree from Iowa State University, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2002.
Dan Ariely is Luis Alvarez Renta Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also heads the e-rationality group at MIT's Media Laboratory. Ariely's research interests include the determinants of consumer preferences, how features such as duration and sequence affect the evaluation of experiences, on-line auction behaviors, and the development of systems to overcome day-to-day irrationality. He has published extensively, including articles in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Consumer Research where he serves on the editorial board. Ariely is co-author of The Joy of Experimental Psychology and also co-authored "The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness May Be Self-Defeating," a chapter in the forthcoming book Psychology and Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Laurence M. Ball is Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has organized conferences on monetary economics and economic fluctuations. Previously, Ball taught at Princeton University and the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University. His current theoretical work focuses on establishing the micro foundations for Keynesian macro models; his applied research focuses on inflation and monetary policy. Recent works by Ball include the NBER working paper "Monetary Policy for Inattentive Economies" and "The NAIRU in Theory and Practice," co-authored with N. Gregory Mankiw in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Recipient of a Houblon-Norman Fellowship from the Bank of England in 2000-2001, Ball has been a Visiting Scholar at several central banks. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his undergraduate degree from Amherst College.
Daniel J. Benjamin is pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University. His previous degrees include a master's degree in mathematical economics from the London School of Economics and a master's in statistics from Harvard University. Benjamin is the author of "Do 401(k)s Increase National Savings? Evidence from Propensity Score Subclassification," forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics, and he is co-author of "Effects of Public Image Concerns and Self-Image on Compliance," published in the Journal of Social Psychology. A Marshall Scholar, Benjamin received numerous awards during his undergraduate years at Harvard, where he majored in economics.
Truman F. Bewley is Alfred Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He has also held appointments in the Departments of Economics at Northwestern University, University of Bonn, Germany, and Harvard University. Since the mid 1990s, much of Bewley's work has sought to explain depressed labor markets, as in his Marshall lecture, "Why Not Cut Pay?" and in his 1999 book Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession. Bewley is also the author of "Interviews as a Valid Empirical Tool in Economics" in the Journal of Socio- Economics; "Fair's Fair" in Nature; and "Fairness, Reciprocity, and Wage Rigidity," a chapter in the book The Moral Sentiments: Theory, Evidence, and Policy. Bewley holds a Ph.D. in economics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, both from the University of California at Berkeley. His undergraduate degree is in history from Cornell University.
Alan S. Blinder is Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics at Princeton University and co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton, where he began teaching in 1971. Blinder's government service includes two years as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1994 to 1996) and two years as a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1993 to 1994). He was a Member of the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange and continues to advise numerous institutions, including the NBER Conference on Income and Wealth and the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity. Author of many academic articles, Blinder also wrote a monthly column for Business Week for many years. A number of his 12 books have been printed in several editions and several languages. Blinder earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following a master's degree from the London School of Economics and an A.B. in economics from Princeton University.
Robert Boyd is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1986. He is co-director of the MacArthur Network on the Nature and Origins of Preferences, an interdisciplinary research group involving scholars from economics, law, psychology, and anthropology in the study of human motives and decisions. Boyd has collaborated extensively with Peter J. Richerson on work that focuses on population models of culture. They have written numerous journal articles, as well as the 1995 book Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Their book The Nature of Cultures is forthcoming. Boyd received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego and a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California at Davis.
Colin F. Camerer is Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology, a position he has held since 1994. He previously was Professor of Strategy and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, and he has been a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Camerer is the author of the recently published Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments on Strategic Interaction. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book Advances in Behavioral Economics. Among Camerer's many journal articles is "An Experimental Approach to the Study of Organizational Culture," written with Roberto Weber and forthcoming in Management Science. Camerer holds an M.B.A. in finance and a Ph.D. in behavioral decision theory from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. His undergraduate degree is in quantitative studies from the Johns Hopkins University.
Rafael Di Tella is Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1997. He previously was affiliated with the Economics Ministry of Argentina. Di Tella has extensively studied corruption and the role of economic and political forces in shaping the welfare state and labor market institutions. He has also done research on happiness and the way it is affected by inequality and macroeconomic fluctuations, as well as the connection between beliefs and economic performance. Di Tella's latest paper examines crime and property rights in an Argentine shantytown. Di Tella holds a D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, and his undergraduate degree is in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Robert H. Frank is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management and also Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. He has previously been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Chief Economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board. Frank is the author of Choosing the Right Pond, Passions Within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, and Luxury Fever. He is the co-author, with Philip Cook, of The Winner-Take-All Society and is author or co-author of several economics textbooks, including Principles of Economics with Ben Bernanke. Frank holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in statistics and a B.S. in mathematics from Georgia Institute of Technology. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal from 1966 to 1968.
Jeffrey C. Fuhrer is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He has been affiliated with the Boston Fed's Research Department since 1992. Previously, he was Senior Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. Fuhrer's recent research has focused on the development of macroeconometric models of inflation, long-term interest rates, monetary policy, consumer spending, and the Phillips curve. He has recently published studies on the importance of habit formation in consumer spending decisions, the persistence of inflation, the interaction between monetary policy and long-term interest rates, and the failure of new rational expectation models to explain business cycle fluctuations. Fuhrer holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. from Princeton University. He is on the board of editors of the American Economic Review.
Robert S. Gibbons is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Organizational Economics and Strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2001-2002, he was Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School. Gibbons previously was Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He has also taught at Princeton. Gibbons' research interests include organizational design and performance, human resource management, labor economics, and behavioral game theory. He is the author of Game Theory for Applied Economists and of the forthcoming book Organizational Economics. Gibbons holds a Ph.D. in decision sciences from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge University, and an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Donald L. Kohn is a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a position he has held since August 2002. He is a veteran of the Federal Reserve System, having previously served as Adviser to the Board for Monetary Policy, Secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee, and Director of the Division of Monetary Policy, among other positions. He began his career as a Financial Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Kohn has written extensively on monetary policy and its implementation by the Federal Reserve. In 2002, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Money Marketeers of New York University. Kohn holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in economics from the College of Wooster.
David I. Laibson is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member of the Department of Economics since 1994. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. He serves on the Health and Retirement Survey Monitoring Committee of the National Institutes of Health. "Optimal Defaults," which Laibson co-authored, was published in the May 2003 American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings. He is also co-author of "A New Challenge for Economics: The Frame Problem," forthcoming in Collected Essays in Psychology and Economics, and author of "Intertemporal Decision Making," in the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Laibson holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.Sc. in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics, and an A.B. from Harvard College.
George Loewenstein is Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has also taught at the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at 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 in Berlin. Loewenstein's research focuses on applications of psychology to economics. His specific interests include decision-making over time, bargaining and negotiations, the psychology of adaptation, the role of emotion in economic behavior, conflict management, and "out of control" behaviors such as impulsive violent crime and drug addiction. He is co-editor of Choice over Time and Time and Decision: Economic and Psychological Perspectives on Intertemporal Choice and has published extensively in journals and in books. Loewenstein was an undergraduate student at Brandeis, spending his third year at Glasgow University, Scotland. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1985.
Cathy E. Minehan is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. As one of the nation's central bankers, she contributes to policy decisions that promote the safety and soundness of the U.S. financial system and the health of the nation's economy. She is an expert in payment systems, a major Fed responsibility. She also focuses her energies on areas of structural economic development within New England, including community development, public education, and training. She chairs the Boston Private Industry Council and serves on the boards of many other civic, professional, and educational organizations, including Jobs for Massachusetts, the United Way, the University of Rochester, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Minehan began her career with the Federal Reserve System following graduation from the University of Rochester. She holds an M.B.A. from New York University. She was named 2002 New Englander of the Year by the New England Council and has received several honorary degrees.
Alicia H. Munnell is Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and also Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. She has been a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and has served as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Economic Policy. Munnell spent much of her career at the Boston Fed, where she was named Senior Vice President and Director of Research in 1984. Munnell is the author of Framing the Social Security Debate: Values, Politics and Economics and Death and Dollars: The Role of Gifts and Bequests in America. She was co-founder and first president of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Munnell is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on numerous advisory boards. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and earned her B.A. at Wellesley College.
Steven Pinker is Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Pinker has taught at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Pinker's books include The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (a New York Times Notable Book of 2002); Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language; How the Mind Works (a Pulitzer nonfiction finalist); and The Language Instinct. He has authored numerous book chapters and journal articles, including "Beyond One Model per Phenomenon," in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Pinker serves on numerous advisory boards, including the National Advisory Committee for The Decade of Behavior and the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Paul G. Allen Institute for Brain Science. Pinker holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard University and a B.A. in psychology from McGill University, along with honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Surrey.
Drazen Prelec is Digital Equipment Corporation LFM Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been affiliated with the Sloan School since 1991 and has also taught at Harvard and in the Department of Economics at MIT. Prelec's research interests include behavioral economics, risk, neuroeconomics, and expert judgment, and he has published widely on these topics. He is the co-author of "Coherent Arbitrariness: Stable Demand Curves without Stable Preferences," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; "Self-signaling and Self-control," a chapter in Time and Decision (in press); and "Arbitrarily Coherent Preferences," a chapter in Psychology and Economics, Volume II. Prelec is a reviewer for a number of journals and is a frequent participant in workshops and conferences on behavioral economics. He holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard University and an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College.
Steven R. Quartz is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also a member of the Computation and Neural Systems Program and Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He has been affiliated with Caltech since 1998. Quartz's research interests include computational modeling of neural development, robotics, and functional brain imaging of social interaction. He is currently studying the neural basis of economic and moral behavior. Quartz is the author of "The Constructivist Brain," published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and is co-author (with Terrence J. Sejnowski) of the book Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Become Who We Are. Quartz holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science and philosophy from the University of California at San Diego and master's and bachelor's degrees from the University of Western Ontario.
Antonio Rangel is Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Associate at the Institut de l'Analisi Economica at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. Rangel is the author of "Forward and Backward Intergenerational Goods: Why Is Social Security Good for the Environment?" forthcoming in the American Economic Review. He is co-author of "Can Markets and Political Institutions Generate Optimal Intergenerational Risk Sharing?" a chapter in the book Risk Aspects of Investment Based Social Security Reform. Rangel recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to study intergenerational and behavioral issues in public economics. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University and received a B.S. in economics from the California Institute of Technology.
Eldar Shafir is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He has been a Visiting Professor both in the United States and abroad, most recently at the Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy. He serves on the Behavioral Economics Roundtable of the Russell Sage Foundation and was a member of the Perception and Cognition Review Committee of the National Institutes of Health. Shafir's research interests include how people make judgments and decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty. He has published extensively on behavioral and cognitive issues. "Remembering Chosen and Assigned Options," which he co-authored, appears in the recently published book Memory and Cognition. Shafir holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in cognitive science from Brown University.
Richard H. Thaler is Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, where he also directs the Center for Decision Research. At the National Bureau of Economic Research, he co-directs the behavioral economics project. Thaler is a pioneer in the fields of behavioral economics and finance and has specialized in the study of decision-making with regard to saving and investing. He is the author of The Winner's Curse and Quasi Rational Economics and the editor of Advances in Behavioral Finance. He writes a series of articles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives under the heading "Anomalies." Thaler holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester and a B.A. in economics from Case Western University.
Tom Tyler is University Professor of Psychology at New York University, where he teaches courses in both law and psychology. His research explores the motivations that shape behavior in groups, organizations, and societies. A focus of concern for Tyler is the psychology of procedural justice-the fairness of group rules and processes. He examines the role of judgments about the justice of group procedures on the attitudes, values, and behaviors of group members. Tyler has published frequently in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and recently co-authored "The Influence of Status Judgments in Hierarchical Groups: Comparing Autonomous and Comparative Judgments about Status" in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Tyler has authored several books, including Why People Obey the Law, Social Justice in a Diverse Society, Cooperation in Groups, and Trust in Organizations. Tyler holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in social psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and a B.A. in psychology from Columbia University.
Duncan J. Watts is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and Director of the Collective Dynamics Group. He is the author or co-author of numerous journal articles, including "An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks," published in Science. He has also authored two books, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness and Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. He is co-editor of The Structure and Dynamics of Complex Networks. Watts also publishes in the popular press, including "Network Space," which appears in the June 2003 issue of Wired Magazine. Watts holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree in physics from University College, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy. He served as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy.
Janet L. Yellen is Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has been a faculty member since 1980. While on leave from the University of California from 1994 to 1999, Yellen served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yellen has specialized in studying the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, president-elect of the Western Economics Association, and a Fellow of the Yale Corporation. In addition to UCLA, she has taught at Harvard University and the London School of Economics. Yellen holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University, as well as honorary degrees from Brown University and Bard College. Her undergraduate degree is from Brown University.
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