The briq Visiting Professor Program aims to promote international networking in the fields of behavioral economics and inequality research. All briq Visiting Professors have signed up for five years and will stay at briq for up to four weeks per year. During their research stays, they present their current work at public events and offer office hours for local researchers. Our goal is to foster an environment of dynamic academic collaboration, especially with the Department of Economics at the University of Bonn.
The program started last year with five outstanding scholars: Roland Bénabou (Princeton University), Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley), Botond Kőszegi (Central European University), George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon University) and Ulrike Malmendier (UC Berkeley).
We are very happy to welcome three new briq Visiting Professors this year:
Flávio Cunha is a Professor of Economics at Rice University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007 and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the economics faculty at Rice. Flávio’s most recent research program focuses on the causes and consequences of inequality and poverty, especially the extent to which labor income inequality is the result of the preexisting heterogeneity present across workers before they enter the labor market versus how much is due to labor market shocks. He is also studying the importance of investments in cognitive and non-cognitive skills in explaining the heterogeneity that determines labor market inequality. His ongoing research project, the Philadelphia Human Development Study, aims to understand the role played by parental expectations about the returns to investing in children affect actual investment decisions.
Paul Heidhues is Professor of Behavioral and Competition Economics at the University of Düsseldorf. He received his PhD in Economics from Rice University in 2000, was a visiting scholar at MIT and Berkeley, and taught at the University of Bonn and ESMT Berlin. Paul worked on numerous topics in Industrial Organization and Competition Policy such as input-market bargaining power, merger control, and collusion. Much of his recent work focuses on the functioning of markets when consumers are partly driven by psychological factors – such as social preferences, loss aversion, time-inconsistency, or naivete – that the classic consumer model abstracts from. He has written on how firms optimally price products and design credit contracts in response to consumers’ psychological tendencies, and he has investigated the implications of various consumer mistakes for the functioning of markets and for consumer-protection regulation.
Ran Spiegler is Professor of Economics at Tel Aviv University and University College London. He obtained his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 1999. 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 incorporates ideas from the “Bayesian networks” literature to model decision makers with flawed causal reasoning.
For information on upcoming visits see the briq researchers page!