Events Calendar

GTHB Seminar

Speaker: Shachar Kariv , University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Who is (More) Rational?

Abstract: Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. They conduct a large-scale field experiment that enables them to test subjects' choices for consistency with utility maximization and to combine the experimental data with a wide range of individual socio-demographic and economic information for the subjects. There is considerable heterogeneity in subjects' consistency scores: high-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency than low-income and low-education subjects, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. They also find that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on current income, education, family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists. [Authors: Syngjoo Choi (Universisty College London), Wieland Muller (Tilburg University) and Dan Silverman (University of Michigan)

Biography: Shachar Kariv was educated at Tel Aviv University and New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 2003, the same year he joined the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor and the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab), a laboratory for conducting experiment-based investigations of issues of interest to social sciences. He was a visiting member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (2005-6), a visiting professor at the European University Institute (2008), and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College of the University of Oxford (2009).

He is the recipient of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award (2008) and the Graduate Economics Association Outstanding Advising Award (2006). He was also awarded NYU College of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award (Golden Dozen) in recognition of excellence in teaching and contributions to undergraduate education (2002) and NYU Dean's Outstanding Teaching Award in the Social Sciences (2001).

For his Ph.D. dissertation at NYU, he received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2003). He also received a National Science Foundation grant for studying decisions under uncertainty in theory and experiments (2006-8). Recently, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for Economics (2009-10).

His fields of interest include game theory, decision theory, and experimental and behavioral economics. His research interests include social learning, social networks, social and moral preferences, and risk preferences. His research has been published in a variety of academic journals including, The American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Theory.

(http://gthb.usc.edu/Seminars/)
*Lunch is included

Host: Prof. Yu-Han Chang

Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal