Andreas Ortmann on Economists, Misbehaving

For our October meeting, the Sydney Behavioural Economics and Behavioural Science Network is excited to announce our speaker will be Andreas Ortmann, PhD, Professor of Experimental and Behavioural Economics and one of Australia’s best known academics working in this space. Andreas will talk about the dangers of setting defaults and nudges without serious insights to back them up.

Further details below

As usual we'll be on the second floor of the Occidental Hotel. See you there.

The BENSyd team.

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Economists, Misbehaving

Behavioral Economics (BE) is widely considered a more realistic version of Economics, made more realistic by importing insights from psychology.

BE has become the marketing flavour of the day, with behavioural insights (“nudge”) teams popping up like mushrooms after a rain and behavioural “architects” and change artists hanging out their shingles and declaring they are open for business.

There can be little doubt, that BE offers intriguing insights and possibilities but it also is handicapped by serious limitations. The talk will be mostly about BE's limitations.

Andreas will discuss the sources of BE insights, as well as the spuriousness of much of the BE evidence, assess in passing the replicability and credibility crisis currently affecting the social sciences (and there in particular economics and psychology), and then discuss the dangers of setting defaults and nudges without serious theorizing, laboratory vetting, and continuous evaluation.

About Andreas Andreas received his PhD in economics from Texas A&M University, USA, where he was a student of one of the prominent pioneers of experimental economics, Ray Battalio. Andreas was one of Battalio’s rat-lab technicians and it was these lower animals that really got him interested in how higher animals function.

Andreas took up his current position of Professor of Experimental and Behavioural Economics in the School of Economics, UNSW Australia Business School in 2009.

Prior to his appointment at the Business School, he was the (Boston Consulting Group) Professor of Economics at CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. Prior to that appointment, he taught at Bowdoin and Colby College, Maine, USA. He also was, for a year each, a visiting scholar of the Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale University, the Max-Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and the Harvard Business School.

He is a member of the UNSW Business School’s research network on Behavioural Insights for Business and Policy [ https://www.business.unsw.edu.au/research/research-strengths/behavioural-insights-for-business-and-policy ] which develops and applies best practices to ensure behavioural insights from experimental research in Economics, Finance, Risk and Actuarial Studies, Accounting, Marketing, and Psychology are credible and robust.

Andreas’s work has been published in journals such as Management Science, Energy Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Journal of Economic Theory, International Journal of Game Theory, Experimental Economics, Psychological Methods, Economic Journal, European Economic Review and many others. His work has been widely cited:

( https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LQpL-jYAAAAJ&hl=en ).