My main areas of interest are behavioural economics, experimental economics and economic theory. My early work was on learning and games, with applications to industrial organisation and finance, but I have always used a mixture of theory and experimental methods. More recently I have been working at the borders with psychology and data science, attempting to understand how psychological traits, cognitive biases, mood, language, culture and beliefs affect behaviour and using a mixture of experimental methods and "Big Data".
I am a Professor of Economics at the Economics Department of the University of Warwick. I am also Deputy Head of Department (with responsibility for research, aka Director of Research). I am a Fellow of CRETA, and a member of the inter-disciplinary DR@W group of behavioural and experimental researchers at the University of Warwick.
Outside Warwick, I am a member of the World Wellbeing Panel formerly based at the LSE and Barcelona and now based in Montreal, a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn and I am also affiliated with the Behavioural Data Science research programme at the Alan Turing Institute in London. I am also a co-founder of the Collective Decision-Making and Culture Lab , a group of 72 researchers spanning 38 countries.
I started my academic life as an undergraduate at Fitzwilliam College in the University of Cambridge. I moved to Nuffield College at the University of Oxford where I gained my doctorate and at the same time worked as a college lecturer at Magdalen, St. Catherine's and St. Hugh's. My first full-time academic post was back at Cambridge, initially as AEA Technology Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College in 2000, before becoming a Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Economics and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Applied Economics (which sadly no longer exists). I left Cambridge in 2007 to take up my post at Warwick.
Between 2015 and 2020 I ran Theme 3 of the ESRC-funded CAGE centre, which focussed on finding better ways to understand and measure subjective wellbeing ("happiness") and related behavioural concepts. This included being part of the team that won a total of £5.5m in funding. Then from 2020-25 I was one of the academic leads of the Behaviour, Brain & Society global research priority for Warwick. In 2025, I became the inaugural Chair of the Behaviour Spotlight, the group which oversees the inter-disciplinary DR@W group of behavioural and experimental researchers at the University of Warwick. I was formerly coordinator of the Experimental and Behavioural Economics Research Group (EBERG) from 2019-25.
I have also been a visiting professor at UCL and at the Centre for Experimental Social Science (CESS) in Oxford, and was a research associate at Nuffield College from 2017-21.