Online Taster Lecture Series: Session Recordings
Weekly taster lectures with Abhinay Muthoo, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick
In these strange and unprecedented times of the Coronavirus pandemic and with all of our schools closed down, we will be offering free weekly taster lectures during May-June designed for students who will be applying (or have applied) to university and who wish to enhance their school curriculum. The lectures are open to anyone across the globe.
This webinar series has now finished. Please review the recordings and further reading below.
Session One: Thursday 14 May 2020
Cooperation in the time of Corona
In this session, we use Game Theory, which is a key topic in Economics, to discuss people’s incentives (or lack of) to cooperate in a context of a Pandemic. We will show how Game Theory can help provide insights into how such cooperation can be secured.
Lecture Slides:
Click here to open PDF
Lecture Recording:
Live Q&A:
Further Reading:
Professor Muthoo recommends the following readings:
- The Company of Strangers, by Paul Seabright, 2010
A book that is hugely relevant to today's topic.
- The Art of Strategy, By Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, 2010
This is a non technical book on Game Theory so easy to read.
- The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, 1989
This is a classic book on evolution includes lots of Economics, competition and cooperation so is a highly recommended read for everyone.
- Covid-19 and the Prisoners' Dilemma, by Pitamber Kaushik, Asia Times, March 2020
- The game theory of panic-buying - and how to reduce it, by Chris Stiff, The Conversation, March 2020
- Covid-19 and Game Theory, John Macdonald, The Adam Smith Institute, March 2020
- Failing to coordinate against the coronavirus pandemic may be very costly for the world, by Matt Jackson, Stanford University, March 2020
- Facing the coronavirus "are we finally going to learn our lesson?" by Jean Tirole, Toulouse School of Economics
Session Two: Thursday 21st May 2020
Intertemporal Cooperation and Coordination
In this session we build on the previous session and in particular explore the extent to which future punishments might induce cooperation today. We will also take a look at problems of coordination. All this using Game Theory.
Lecture Slides:
Click here to open PDF
Lecture Recording:
Live Q&A:
Further Reading:
There is a huge literature in economics on “repeated games” which is all about studying “intertemporal cooperation”, and in various contexts/applications. But much of it is technical so won’t reference to that here. Instead:
From last week’s readings, the themes of intertemporal cooperation, repeated interaction, reciprocity and trust are discussed in:
- Dixit and Nalebuff’s book, pages 73-94; Seabright’s book, chapter 3; and Dawkins’s book, chapter 10.
A few additional things to read/look at are:
- The Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 was all about game theory especially on “cooperation”
– some readings here too and non-technical - Robert Aumann, one of the two who got the prize, is the pioneer on repeated games. - The Nobel Committee’s paper explaining what they did
- Section 3.1 is about intertemporal cooperation, also known as long-run cooperation. - Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
- a nice, short piece that is about intertemporal cooperation - and as applied to the corporate world. - An application to public goods
- this paper in the science journal Nature is an interesting application of similar issues to individual contributions to the provision of public goods. A bit more intricate the article is but still non-technical and worth a read/skim at least as much as you can as is another context/application.
Session Three: Thursday 4th June 2020
Insights from Behavioural Economics for Covid-19
In this session we discuss how insights from Behavioural Economics and Nudge Theory can help design policies to deal with controlling Pandemics such as Covid-19. We will talk about a few of the main cognitive biases that us humans possess, and which in turn can inform policy.
Lecture Slides:
Click here to open PDF
Lecture:
Live Q&A:
Further Reading:
Professor Muthoo recommends the following books and articles as relevant further reading for Session 3 and 4:
- The book Nudge is a book on how behavioural economics is applied to develop policies to affect behaviour, and is non-technical and so easy to read - one of the authors is economist Richard Thaler who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017 - note that the link takes you to the Nobel Committee page with interesting information including about his work and so relevant for Sessions 3 and 4 and worth checking out. Here is a link to the book - Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, 2009
- The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman is worth takin a look at, Daniel is one of the main pioneers of the Behavioural Economics and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 – the write-ups in the link are also useful. Here is a link to the book -Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, 2012
Other useful readings/articles:
- Your brain evolved to hoard supplies and shame others for doing the same, by Stephanie Preston, The Conversation, March 2020
- Why is the [UK] Government relying on Nudge Theory to fight coronavirus? by Tony Yates, The Guardian, March 2020
- Coronavirus: how the UK Government is using Behavioural Science, by Stuart Mills, The Conversation, March 2020
- The Behavioural Science of Covid-19, by Ravi Dhar, Yale School of Management, March 2020
- How Behavioural Science could help us stop coronavirus, by Peter Lunn, Prospect Magazine, March 2020
Session Four: Thursday 11th June 2020
Behavioural Economics for Pandemics
In this session we build on the previous one and in particular we look at other key cognitive biases, and tease out their implications for behaviour and, in turn, for policy-making of the nudge variety.
Lecture Slides:
Click here to open PDF
Lecture:
Q&A session:
Further Reading:
Please see session three above for further reading for this session.
Thank you to everyone who attended our Pre-University Taster Lecture Series "Economics in the Real World". We have really enjoyed putting this webinar series on for you and receiving all your fantastic questions for Professor Muthoo - it was a true delight!
For those of you who would like to learn more about this topic or are looking for further materials for independent study, we’ve put together some helpful online resources which might be of interest to you while you’re spending more time learning from home:
Online Resources
We’ve put together some helpful online resources which might be of interest to you while you’re spending more time learning from home.
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