Programme

(*) Full Programme with links to all abstracts/papers (only available for registered participants)

Keynote Talks

Friday, June 11

4.00 PM
(Central European Summer Time)

John A. List (The University of Chicago)

The Voltage Effect in Behavioral Economics

Behavioral Economics (BE) 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. I denote this as the “scale-up” problem, which 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?

Saturday, June 12

2.00 PM (Central European Summer Time)

Shyam Sunder (Yale University)

Organizations sans Markets: Efficient Production of Public Goods

Throughout Herbert A. Simon’s oeuvre extending over six decades, exploration of the nature of human decision-making and their complex interactions in the context of organizations and markets remained a common thread. Surprisingly, analysis of organizations whose outputs have either weak or no markets (i.e., public goods which represent some 40% percent or more of U.S. and other developed economies), has been underserved in economics and organization theory; most attention has been devoted to organizations having competitive markets for their outputs—called private goods. On foundations of Barnard and Simon’s theories, I build a model of public-good producing organizations and show why and how they must differ from private-good producing (business) organizations in financing, managerial structure, and control. The problem of efficiently producing public goods is rendered difficult because such organizations do not benefit from free and effective monitoring by customers. Consequently, management structures with elements of Weberian bureaucracy perform well in public good organizations. More generally, as the markets in which an organizational unit transacts get weaker or disappear, organizational form compensate and adjust by becoming more bureaucratic. The availability of free monitoring of management by market agents (customers and suppliers) determines the organizational form.