Selten Lecture with John List: The Voltage Effect in Behavioral and Experimental Economics

Virtual Selten Lecture 2021 with John List

John List, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, will deliver this year’s virtual Selten Lecture on “The Voltage Effect in Behavioral and Experimental Economics”.

Abstract:

Behavioral Economics and lab/field experiments in the last several decades have contributed to the deepening scientific knowledge by uncovering mechanisms, producing key interventions, and estimating program effects.  This represented a logical first step, as experimentalists sought to provide deeper empirical insights and theoretical tests as part of the credibility revolution of the 1990s.  Nevertheless, what has been lacking is a scientific understanding of how to make optimal use of the scientific insights generated for policy purposes. This “scale-up” problem revolves around several important questions, such as: do the BE insights we find in the petri dish scale to larger markets and settings? When we scale the BE intervention to broader and larger populations, should we expect the same level of efficacy that we observed in the small-scale setting? If not, then what are the important threats to scalability? What can the researcher do from the beginning of their scholarly pursuit to ensure eventual scalability and avoid voltage drops?

John List’s research focuses on education and explores charitable giving and many subsets of microeconomics including how behavioral economic theories apply in the real world.

With the Selten Lecture, the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute and the Reinhard Selten Institute invite on an annual basis internationally renowned researchers for a lecture for interested researchers.

Register here