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The Psychology of Decisions Under Scarcity

16 December 2013

Time: 11:45am
Venue: David Sizer Lecture Theatre, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus

This talk will review some recent research into the psychology that emerges in contexts of scarcity, and the decisions -- some commendable, others problematic -- that ensue.  Some implications for our understanding of poverty and for policy will be considered

Speaker
Professor Eldar Shafir, William Stuart Tod Professor of Psychology & Public Affairs. Princeton University

Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a social science R&D lab.  He studies decision-making, cognitive science, and behavioral economics.  His current research focuses on decision-making in contexts of poverty and on the application of behavioral research to policy.  He is Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and was a member of President Barack Obama???s Advisory Council on Financial Capability.  He has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the Kennedy School of Government, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. He has received several awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship. He recently edited a book called ???The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy,??? (Princeton University Press, 2012), and has co-authored, with economist Sendhil Mullainathan, a book called ???Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,??? (Henry Holt Times Books). He received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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