Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures:
The Psychology of Saving & Investment
Speaker: Professor David Laibson, Harvard University
Date: November 19, 20 and 21 at 6.30 pm
Venue: Old Theatre, LSE, Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Podcasts now available - download and listen to each lecture in MP3 format.
These lectures will challenge many standard assumptions in economics, and show how a combination of psychology and economics can better predict behaviour
- Monday 19 November: Lecture 1 - Intertemporal Choice
How do people value delayed rewards? Is a Snickers bar tomorrow psychologically valued as much as a Snickers bar today? How can social
scientists measure and model these time preferences? How has neuroscience and neuroimaging provided new insights about these intertemporal
tradeoffs?
Download slides (PDF)
Listen to podcast: MP3
- Tuesday 20 November: Lecture 2 - Investment for Dummies
How do institutions affect the investment decisions that people make? Why do defaults and other seemingly irrelevant institutional features
dominate people’s financial choices? How are these empirical and theoretical findings influencing both conceptual academic debates and
practical policy debates? What financial system should we establish if investors are imperfectly rational?
Download slides (PDF)
Listen to podcast: MP3
- Wednesday 21 November: Lecture 3 - Sticky Biases and the Curse of Education
Why does the marketplace fail to eliminate behavioral biases? Why are there insufficient incentives for firms to compete by educating biased
consumers and thereby winning their business? Indeed, why does the marketplace sometimes augment behavioral biases? How should economists
model market equilibria in which rational firms interact with imperfectly rational consumers?
Download slides (PDF)
Listen to podcast: MP3
David Laibson is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and one of the leaders in the new field of 'behavioural economics'
For more information, please contact Jo Cantlay at j.m.cantlay@lse.ac.uk.