Alina Velias

Welcome to my website! I am an experimental economist, interested in applications of behavioural theory to better understand how people make decisions in critical domains such as health, the environment, and prosocial behaviour. I am currently a London School of Economics Fellow at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. I am also participating in an ERC-funded project titled “Smart Water Futures: Designing the Next Generation of Urban Drinking Water Systems”. I gained my PhD at the department of Economics at City, University of London.

Working Papers

Publications

Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics of Environmental Values (with Phoebe Koundouri, Barbara Hammer, Ulrike Kuhl) Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2023, 153-176
The best is yet to come: Retirement and prosocial behaviour (with Ioannis Laliotis and Sotiris Georganas) [slides][blog post][podcast]
Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, Vol. 196, 2022
COVID-19: Early evening curfews and mobility (with Sotiris Georganas and Sotiris Vandoros)
Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 292, 2022
Who’s miserable now? Identifying clusters of people with the lowest subjective wellbeing in the UK (with Paul Dolan and Kate Laffan)
Social Choice and Welfare, 2021
Financialization of the food value chain, common ownership and competition law (with Ioannis Lianos, Dmitry Katalevsky, George Ovchinnikov)
European Competition Journal, Vol 16(1), 2020
Effects of Terrorism Threat on Economic Preferences: The Role of Personality (with Philip Corr)
Journal of Terrorism Research, Vol. 8(2), 2017

Work in Progress

Measuring Aspects of Social Capital Using Wikipedia Editing Activity

I process Wikipedia archives in all major languages to extract data and build a granular time-series dataset to create a new measure of social capital.

Eliciting patient's perceived value of medication: a Discrete Choice Experiment (with Erica Visintin)

Do Biased Beliefs Explain the Suboptimal Use of Commitment in Intertemporal choice? (with Sotiris Georganas and Jan Christoph Schlegel)

Classic (deterministic) models of dynamically inconsistent preferences posit that agents who anticipate own future lapses of self-control can benefit from costly commitment, such as contracts that penalise these lapses. Empirical evidence shows that many temporaly-inconsistent individuals either do not demand commitment or buy commitment contract and default on it. This paper explores to what extent this evidence is explained by individuals’ biased beliefs about their future performance. We use controlled experimental environment to manipulate biased expectations in form of optimistic/pessimistic forecasts of future performance. This allows us to isolate the role of beliefs in suboptimal use of commitment.

Education

PhD in Economics, City, University of London (2015-2021)
MSc in Behavioural Economics, City, University of London (2014-2015)
BSc in Philosophy and Economics, London School of Economics (2008-2011)

CV (in PDF)