Speakers
John Ledyard (Caltech) - Keynote Speaker
John O. Ledyard is the Alan and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he has been teaching since 1986. Previous positions include Northwestern University, where he was the Sydney G. Harris Professor of Social Science, and Carnegie Mellon University. He holds an AB degree in Mathematics from Wabash College and MS and PhD, both in economics, from Purdue University. At Caltech, he was a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar (1977-78) and later was the Chairman of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (1992-2002).
Professor Ledyard’s list of honorary distinctions and service includes an Honorary Degree from Purdue University and being a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Public Choice Society and a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. He has served on several editorial boards of economics and public choice journals, on advisory committees to the National Science Foundation and other organizations, and as the President of the Public Choice Society.
Professor Ledyard's primary research is on the theoretical foundations and the applications of mechanism design. He has contributed greatly to our understanding of the roles of incentives and information in organizations. His theoretical work has provided insights into what is possible and what is not in the design of incentive compatible organizations and voting systems. His more applied work has included the design and development of computer-assisted markets for trading pollution rights, acquiring logistics contracts, swapping portfolios of thinly traded securities, prediction markets, and advertising time. His current research includes the design of market-based approaches for managing spacecraft and instrument design (approaches designed to reduce cost-over runs and improve the science recovered), and the design of cap and trade systems for the control of over-fishing and creating sustainable fisheries.
Francis Bloch (Paris School of Economics) - Guest Speaker
Professor Bloch graduated from HEC and received a PhD in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at Brown University, HEC Paris, Université Catholique de Louvain, Université d'Aix-Marseille and Ecole Polytechnique. He is currently Professor of Economics at Université Paris 1 and the Paris School of Economics.
Professor Bloch's research interests are coalition and network theory, and he has also worked on applications in Industrial Organization, Public and Development Economics. His research has been published in American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, among others. He is currently an Associate Editor of Econometrica, Economics Letters, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economic Theory and Mathematical Social Sciences.
Bettina Klaus (HEC Lausanne) - Guest Speaker
Bettina Klaus is the Professor of Microeconomic Theory at the Faculty of Business and Economics of University of Lausanne. She received her PhD from the University of Maastricht in 1998 and has worked in the US (University of Lincoln Nebraska), Spain (Autonoma de Barcelona), and The Netherlands (University of Maastricht) before moving to Switzerland in 2009. Her research focuses on Fair Division, Market Design, Matching Theory, and Social Choice Theory.
Ronald Peeters (Otago) - Guest Speaker
Professor Ronald Peeters joined the University of Otago in October 2017. His research interests are best summarised as “anything that deals with coordination and cooperation (on socially desirable outcomes, including social norms) in dynamic settings of strategic interaction.” His methodological toolkit consists of game theory (dynamic games, evolutionary games), learning models (bounded rationality), social networks, computational economics, laboratory experiments and simulations. One particular topic within this broad area concerns the evolution of socially desirable behaviour within social networks. In addition, he develops mechanisms to elicit and aggregate beliefs and expectations for the purpose of predicting future events.
Thomas Pfeiffer (NZIAS and Massey University) - Guest Speaker
Thomas Pfeiffer is a Professor at the New Zealand Institute of Advanced Studies at Massey University. He graduated in biophysics from Humboldt University Berlin, received a PhD from the ETH Zurich, and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University. His research focus is game theory and its applications in evolutionary biology, human behaviour and economics, and he uses mathematical and computational modelling techniques as well as experimental approaches. Thomas Pfeiffer is a member of the Centre for Mathematical Social Sciences (CMSS).
Matthew Ryan (AUT) - Guest Speaker
Matthew Ryan is an alumnus of the University of Auckland (from where he obtained a BA in Economics and Philosophy) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at Auckland University of Technology. His PhD is from Yale University. He has previously held appointments at the University of Auckland and the Australian National University. He was a founding Director of the Economic Design Network (2005-2009) and past Director (2013) of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science. Matthew has worked across a range of areas in theoretical microeconomics but his main interests are in decision theory. Most recently, he has been studying the axiomatic foundations of probabilistic models of choice and their implications for the interpretation of experimental evidence on the descriptive validity of expected utility and its theoretical competitors.
Fernando Beltrán (Auckland) - Local Organiser and Co-Director of DECIDE
Fernando Beltrán is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland (Information Systems and Operations Management - ISOM - Department). He received a BE in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. His research interests include the economics of service competition in open-access Next-Generation platforms, the digital dividend, and the efficient sharing and allocation of radio spectrum. He has pioneered the application of agent-based computational methods to simulate and analyse new conditions of competition and regulation in Next-Generation networks and the consumer’s fibre uptake problem in the context of national broadband deployments. His current work is devoted to the application on a combined, complementary approach to auction design by which auctions administered in an experimental environment (experimental economics), on the one hand, and an agent-based computational simulation environment, on the other, are used to test auction efficiency and other aspects for improved auction design.
Valery Pavlov (Auckland) - Local Organiser and Co-Director of DECIDE
Dr Valery Pavlov joined the University of Auckland (ISOM Department) in 2010. He received his PhD from Penn State University where he studied under the guidance of Prof Elena Katok the role of behavioural factors such as fairness and bounded rationality on the performance of supply chain contracts. His research interests mostly focus on behavioural aspects of typical business decision-making problems ranging from bounded rationality in individual decisions, other-regarding preferences and knowledge transfer in teams.
Simona Fabrizi (Auckland) - Local Organiser
Dr Simona Fabrizi joined the University of Auckland (Economics Department) in mid-August 2016. Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Massey University (2007-2016), a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales (Jul 2014-Feb 2015) and a Lecturer in Economics at Keele University, UK (2006-2007). Simona was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Basque Country (2003-2006) and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Mannheim (2002-2003). She is the Co-Founder of the Research Network for Applied and Theoretical Economics (ATE) and of the Asia-Pacific Industrial Organisation Society (APIOS). She is a member of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) since 2010 and has served as its Director in 2017. Her research interests are in the fields of Economic Theory & Design, Innovation Theory, Decision Theory, Information Economics, Industrial Economics, Network Industries, Competition Law & Policy, and Public & Institutional Economics.
Steffen Lippert (Auckland) - Local Organiser
Dr Steffen Lippert joined the University of Auckland (Economics Department) in July 2014. Prior to this, he was a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Otago and at Massey University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. He studied Economics at Mannheim, Berkeley, and Toulouse and received his PhD in Economics in 2005 jointly from the Toulouse School of Economics and Mannheim University. He currently is the Director of the Centre for Mathematical Social Sciences (CMSS). His research focuses on Industrial Economics, the Economics of Innovation, and the Economics of Social Interaction and Networks. He is a co-founder of the Research Network for Applied and Theoretical Economics, ATE and of the Asia-Pacific Industrial Organisation Society (APIOS).
Sherry Li (Auckland)
Sherry Li is a PhD student at the University of Auckland (Economics Department). She was a Lecturer in Economics at the New Start Programme (2014-2017) at the University of Auckland. Her research area is experimental economics with an emphasis on gender and leadership as well as the role of trust and reciprocity.
Dr Gavin Northey is a lecturer at the University of Auckland (Marketing Department). Having worked in both industry and academia, he sees the continual transfer of evidence-based knowledge between the two as a defining career objective. As a researcher, Gavin focuses on both the causes and implications of consumer behaviour in different marketing scenarios. He loosely follows a constructivist approach to examine the effects of both learned and developmental knowledge on human behaviour. A committed sensory marketer, he believes the human sensory modalities are the nexus for a firm's product offerings and its long-term competitive advantage.
Addison Pan (Auckland) - Manager of DECIDE
Dr Addison Pan joined the University of Auckland (Economics Department) as a Post-doctoral research fellow in September 2016, after receiving her PhD in Economics in August 2016 from Massey University. She is the manager of the Laboratory for Business Decision Making (DECIDE). She is also a member of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science (CMSS) and the Research Network for Applied and Theoretical Economics (ATE). Her research focuses on decision theory, experimental methods and behavioural economics.