The School of Economics and Politics (SOEP) organized a lecture by Dr. Sara Adel Mansour, Associate Professor of Economics, to deliver a lecture on: Economics in Reality.
Dr. Sarah Mansour, Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Economics & Politics (SOEP), gave a talk on the role of experimentation in Economics as a discipline. She started out with a game to exhibit the significance of non-monetary components of utility in driving behavior. She also illustrated real-life examples that weren’t explainable through traditional economic theory: the tipping behavior in Uber app and donating money to Al-Orman foundation. She then moved to discuss several biases and heuristics that affect an individual’s decision-making process, such as: loss aversion, availability bias, representativeness bias, and status quo bias. She concluded emphasizing the importance of economic experiments in (i) “speaking to theorists” by testing their hypotheses in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies) societies and (ii) “whispering in the ears of princes” by having behaviorally informed public policies.
