I work in structural behavioural economics, where I study the art of building econometric bridges between decision theory and empirical data. My research focuses on estimating people’s risk, time, and ambiguity preferences (e.g., what their utility and discounting functions look like). To this end, I often use data on their decisions in lottery choice experiments and money earlier-or-later experiments. I began my career as a health economist, specialising in a stated preference method known as best–worst scaling; the choice modelling techniques that I studied then form the basis of the econometric tools that I now apply to the experimental data.
I'm a Professor in Economics at Loughborough University. Previously, I was a Professor in Economics at Durham University, where I had also worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor. I learned my trade from Denise Doiron and Denzil Fiebig; they had trained and mentored me since my second year at UNSW Sydney through my PhD at the same university.
You can contact me by email at h.i.yoo@lboro.ac.uk. My contact information is also available on my faculty website.
Trivia: My surname is Yoo (유; 劉), which is pronounced like the word "you" and makes me HI Yoo in author abbreviations. My family and friends call me Hong Il (홍일; 洪一), rather than just Hong, but there is one caveat. If you stare at "Il" long enough, you'll notice that the first I is slightly thicker than the second l; the first bar is a capital I and the second bar is a small L. Contrary to what sans-serif fonts make it look like, I'm not Hong the Second. If anything, I'm Hong the First: Il (that is, IL in all caps) means #1 in Korean.
