Ran Spiegler explores what happens when people confuse the concepts of correlation and causation. In his research he aims at bringing behavioral economics and economic theory closer together. This video was made during his research visit at briq in the fall of 2017.
Video
Three questions with Ran Spiegler
Ran Spiegler
ImageRan Spiegler (1999 Ph.D, Tel Aviv University) is the Aaron Rubinstein professor of economics at Tel Aviv University and a professor of economics at University College London. He is a research fellow of the CEPR programme in industrial organization, a member of the UK Centre for Macroeconomics and a member of the CESifo network in behavioral economics.
Ran is a microeconomic theorist whose main line of research involves modeling departures from the standard rational-choice paradigm in various contexts: interaction between players with justifiability motives; strategic policy making when the public employs naive attribution heuristics to evaluate reforms; a dynamic search-matching model of the labor market with reference-dependent workers; etc. Ran has written extensively on market models with non-rational consumers, culminating in the textbook "Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization" (OUP, 2011). In recent years, his main research agenda (funded by an ERC grant) incorporates ideas from the "Bayesian networks" literature to model decision makers with flawed causal reasoning.
Ran is currently the chief editor of Theoretical Economics. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, and received the 2013 Michael Bruno award and the 2017 Yrjo Jahnsson award.