I work in structural behavioural economics, the misty area where theoretical models in behavioural economics meet individual-level data. My main interest is in estimating people’s risk, ambiguity, and time 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 academic career as a health economist, specialising in a stated preference method known as best–worst scaling; the choice modelling techniques that I studied during that time form the basis of the econometric tools that I now apply to the experimental data.
I am a Professor in Economics at Loughborough University. Previously, I was a Professor of 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 makes me Yoo, H. I. or 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 will 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 am not Hong the Second. If anything, I am Hong the First: Il (that is, IL in all caps) means #1 in Korean.
The first sentence on this page is inspired by Martin Browning’s outline of his research: "I work mostly in that misty area where microeconomic theory meets micro data — popularly known as applied microeconometrics."
