Senior Economist
T: 617-973-3017
F: 617-973-3957
Julian.Jamison@bos.frb.org

Biography
Julian Jamison is a senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, as part of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking. His research focuses on how individuals choose their actions, especially with regard to risk tolerance, time preferences, and demand for information. He pursues these studies using lab experiments, field experiments, and theoretical analyses. He received degrees in mathematics from Caltech and a PhD in economics from MIT. Prior to joining the Boston Fed in 2009, he was affiliated with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California. He is also a visiting faculty member at Yale, a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School, and a research affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action. He has consulted for multiple private and public organizations, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA-Ames, the World Bank, and the National Institutes of Health.

Education

Ph. D. (Economics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1998

M.S. (Mathematics), California Institute of Technology, 1994

B.S. (Mathematics, with Honors), California Institute of Technology, 1994

Work experience

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Senior Economist, 2009

 

University of Southern California, Brain and Creativity Institute

Research Assistant Professor of Psychology, 2006–2009

 

Yale University, Department of Economics

Visiting Faculty, 2008–

 

Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government

Visiting Scholar, 2008–

 

NASA, Ames Research Center, Intelligent Systems Division

Visiting Scholar, 2008

 

University of California (Berkeley and San Francisco)

Research Director, Haas School of Business, Experimental Social Science Laboratory, 2005–2008

Fellow, Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program, 2004–2006

 

HEC School of Management, Finance and Economics

Visiting Scholar, 2007

 

California Institute of Technology, Social Sciences Division

Visiting Scholar, 2006–2007

 

Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, MEDS Department

Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Science, 1999–2004

Publications

Refereed articles

“When Curiosity Kills the Profits: An Experimental Examination,” with Dean Karlan. Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming.

“Well-Being and Neuroeconomics.” Economics and Philosophy 24(3): 407–418 (2008).

“To Deceive or Not to Deceive: The Effect of Deception on Behavior in Future Laboratory Experiments,” with Dean Karlan and Laura Schecter. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 68: 477–488 (2008).

“Sequential Common-Value Auctions with Asymmetrically Informed Bidders,” with Johannes Hőrner. Review of Economics and Statistics 75: 475–498 (2008).

“Collusion with (Almost) No Information,” with Johannes Hőrner. RAND Journal of Economics 38(3): 804–822 (2007).

“What’s in the Dictionary (or Is It?),” with Johannes Hőrner. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 14(2): 215–221 (2007).

“The Le Chatelier Principle in Lattices.” Economics Bulletin 3(2): 1–9 (2006).

“Lithium Revisited: Savings Brought About by the Use of Lithium, 1970–1991,” with Richard J. Wyatt and Ioline Henter. Psychiatric Quarterly 72(2): 149–166 (Summer 2001).

“Costly Offers and the Equilibration Properties of the Multiple Unit Double Auction Under Conditions of Unpredictable Shifts of Demand and Supply,” with Charles R. Plott. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 32: 591–617 (April 1997).  Reprinted in Market Institutions and Price Discovery: Collected Papers on the Experimental Foundations of Economics and Political Science (II) Edward Elgar Publishers, Cheltenham UK (2001).

Other journal articles

“Designing Markets for the Common Good.” Kellogg World 3 (Winter 2002).

“Optimal Strategy for a Number-Guessing Game,” with Kenneth Schilling, Christian Blatter, et al. American Math Monthly 113(1): 81–82 (2006).

Books and book chapters

“Do Only Women Clean in a ‘Perfect’ World?” with Johannes Hőrner in Proceedings of the International Conference of Mathematicians 2002: Game Theory and Applications, Qingdao Publishing House (2002).

“Incorporating Deaths Near the Time of Birth into Estimates of the Global Burden of Disease,” with Dean T. Jamison, Sonbol Shalid-Salles, Joy Lawn, and Julks Zupan in The Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors, Alan Lopez et al., eds. Oxford (2006).

“Toward a Theory of Syntax and Persuasive Communication,” in Exact Methods in the Study of Language and Text, Grzybek and Kőhler, eds. De Gruyter, Berlin (2007).

Working papers and other unpublished papers

"Social and Private Learning with Endogenous Decision Timing" with David Owens and Glenn Woroch. FRB Boston Working Papers Series, paper no. 09-11 (2009).

“Discounting,” with Dean Jamison. Disease Control Priorities Project Working Paper #4 (March 2003).

“The Effects of Circadian Cycle Disruptions on Risk Attitudes and Decision-making in Emergency Medicine Residents,” with Karen Shih and Stuart Swadron. Submitted paper.

“The Amount and Speed of Discounting,” with Dean T. Jamison. Submitted paper.

“Neural Correlates of Pure Time Preference,” with Jon Wegener, Kristoffer Madsen, Mark Christensen, and Olaf Paulson. Submitted paper.

“Non-Rationality in Non-Repeated Games,” with David H. Wolpert and David Newth. Submitted paper.

“Hotelling’s Spatial Model with Finitely Many Consumers,” with Johannes Hőrner. Working paper.

“Correlations Between Economic Preferences and Health Behaviors.” Working paper.

“The Role of Autonomic Reactivity in Decision-making,” with Sara Johnson and Constance Wang. Working paper.

“Games with Synergistic Utilities.” Working paper.

“Product Preferences: From Early Visual Processing to Preference-based Choice,” with Daniel Krawczyk. Working paper.

“On the Prediction of Subjective Well-being for Future Health States,” with Joel Halpern. Working paper.

“Social Learning: Imitation, Information, and Externalities,” with David Owens and Glenn Woroch. Working paper.

“Persona Games,” with David Wolpert. Working paper.

“Methodological Challenges in Psychiatric Treatment Adherence Research,” with William Riley et al. Working paper.

“Valuable Cheap-Talk and Equilibrium Selection.” Working paper.