Monday, February 11 at 12:15 (room A-2.116), we are happy to host Professor Lionel Page from the University of Technology Sydney, who will give a research seminar on winner effects, which would be of interest to scholars from the fields of psychology, business, biology, economics and sports (see below the abstract).
Professor Page possesses research skills from different fields including Econometrics, Decision Theory, Sociology and Behavioral Economics and applies them to practical problems from areas of financial and prediction markets, education and inequality. His research regularly attracts the attention of media, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, and Wall Street Journal.
Lionel Page received the 2016 Young Economist Prize from the Economic Society of Australia. He is a coordinator editor of Theory and Decision as well as associate editor of Behavioural Public Policy (Ed. G. Akerlof, C. who won the Nobel Prize in Economics).
“Winner effect in contests”
Abstract:
Is there a winner effect in contests? Or is it just an illusion? I will first review the different debates on this question in economics, psychology and biology. I will then present a series of studies I have conducted which make it possible to identify whether a winner effect exists and to disentangle several explanations. These studies show that a winner effect definitely exists, however its causes seem to differ across contexts. It seems sometimes driven by incentives and sometimes it seems purely psychological (i.e. unexplained by standard theory). I will then propose a new theoretical framework which makes it possible to integrate both types of winner effects in one. In this theoretical framework, a psychological winner effect is actually driven by incentives in a incomplete information settings. I show how this model explains the different natures of winner effects across contexts