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   Munich Lectures in Economics 2013

Ernst Fehr

Foundations of Economic Preferences

How do society and biology shape the individual? This is one of the most fundamental questions for economists if they want to understand the economic behavior of human beings. For generations, economic scholars have relied on a conception of human attitudes based on selfishness and rationality. However, over the last 20 years, during which empirical research has demonstrated that people deviate systematically from rational modes of behavior and social values such as fairness, new approaches have been tried to gain a more realistic idea of what makes humans tick. (See, for instance, our Featured CESifo Working Paper in this issue.)

Ernst Fehr, this year’s Distinguished CES Fellow, is one of the most influential economic scientists responsible for this psychological turnaround in economics. His Munich Lectures in Economics, entitled “Foundations of Economic Preferences” aims to shed light on the proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human behavior. An intellectual voyage that will look both on the neurobiological foundations of social norms and the interplay between social preferences and strategic interactions.

On Ernst Fehr

Ernst Fehr is Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economics at the University of Zurich, where he also serves as director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. He was born in Hard (Austria) in 1956 and studied Economics at the University of Vienna, where he later obtained his PhD in Economics and completed his post-doctoral degree (“Habilitation”).

When he talks about his research agenda he emphasises that fairness and cooperation are the cornerstones for progress in our society. As a consequence, his pioneering research focuses on the proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human altruism. His work is characterized by the combination of game theoretic tools with experimental methods. With this non-standard way of framing economic behaviour, he has succeeded in reconstructing economics using insights from social psychology, sociology and neuroscience.

Ernst Fehr has received several prestigious awards in recent years for his outstanding contributions to economics science, including the Marcel-Benoist Prize (2008), the Vorarlberg Science Prize (2010), the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2012) and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize (2013). According to RePEc he is one of the world’s most cited economists and is seen as a promising candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ernst Fehr has numerous publications in international top journals including Science, Nature, Neuron, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Psychological Science.

The Distinguished CES Fellow Award

Every year the Center for Economic Studies (CES) awards a prize to an economist who has greatly contributed to the understanding of economic policy problems. Ernst Fehr follows in the footsteps of previous prominent awardees such as Peter Diamond (Nobel Laureate 2010), Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate 2008) and Esther Duflo, and will give the Munich Lectures in Economics 2013 as part of the ceremony. The prize is endowed with 10,000 Euros.
Ernst Fehr’s Munich Lectures in Economics are entitled “Foundations of Economic Preferences” and will start on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 at 18.00 in the Great Hall of LMU Munich. Because of the 20th Munich Lectures, this year several Distinguished CES Fellows from the last two decades will also participate, including Avinash Dixit, Olivier Blanchard and Andrei Shleifer. The event is kindly supported by Munich Re and the whole lecture series will also be published by MIT Press.