Behavioral Economics of Risk and Learning
ECON 980BB
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
The seminar will focus on theoretical and experimental issues in behavioral economics. We will focus on two topics: risk and learning. How much risk are people willing to take and how their beliefs change in response to new data, so things like certainty effect, overconfidence, confirmation bias, belief polarization, stereotyping, etc. We will study relationships between mathematical models of individual behavior and the kinds of behavior we can observe in the lab. We will design experiments to test various theories and also study the types of behavior for which we don't have good models yet, and try to understand what a good model would look like. This is a junior tutorial.
Recommended Prep
Prior knowledge of behavioral economics will be useful but not necessary. The course will focus on analytical methods and therefore requires knowledge of probability and statistics.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
