Human Behavior

This research project develops tools that allow social scientists to understand how and when social factors, such as peer influences, role models, or norms, affect individual choices.

This research project explores how genomic data can inform the understanding of social science questions. The genomic revolution means that social scientists are able to correlate a range of outcomes and behaviors with genes. This research studies what these correlations mean.

A more realistic version of how people “maximize utility”

Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

This research project studies the pricing and liquidity implications of sentiment and disagreement as origins of radical uncertainty in financial markets.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Changing the incentives for how economists determine both the content of the subject and their approach to scientific research could increase the range of thinking in the profession

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three replicate.

At the heart of economics is a theory of action. It reflects views about how human beings make economic decisions and leads to an analysis of aggregate consequences.

Neoclassical economics has abolished the role of psychology in decision making by assuming that all individuals are rational optimizers with rational expectations about future events.