Seminar 6: Dr Leonhard Lades and Ruochen Dong

26th of August, 2016

Summary

We were happy to host assistant professor Dr Leonhard Lades from the University of Stirling and local Ruochen Dong as our speakers. Leonhard gave his views on the economics of temptation and self-control, while Ruochen talked about other-regarding preferences.

Leonhard's Talk: Self-control and inter-temporal choice

“In both (behavioural) economics and psychology, self-control problems have received much attention. However, the two disciplines' approaches are very different. This presentation reflects on theoretical and experimental differences between economics and psychology, and discusses whether integrating more insights from psychology can be of value to the theoretical and applied economist.”

Contact Leonhard

Ruochen talked about "Fairness, altruism and reciprocity"

“People like to help those who are helping them and to hurt those who are hurting them. It sounds to be different from the traditional view that people care only about their own business. In fact, it has been experimentally verified that people contribute to public goods more than can be explained by pure self interest, and that those free to allocate money choose to sacrifice some to retaliate against unfair treatment rather than grabbing all the money. One case point in which fairness has been studied is monopoly pricing. Some general questions such as what plays an important role in fairness judgement, what is the proper allocation rule, what are different ideas towards altruism and the relation to reciprocity and cooperation will be discussed.”

Contact Ruochen