Cogito ergo sum
On June 4-6, 2009, The Higher School of Economics hosted the 3rd International CAS-NES conference, "Rationality, behaviour and experiments". The conference was organized by the HSE Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) and the HSE Laboratory for Experimental and Behavioural Economics. Researchers from Russia, Sweden, Israel, Italy and the United States presented their research on rationality, the behavioural foundations of individual and collective decision making theories and experimental economics as well as sharing their thoughts on the basis of such research with their colleagues, conference participants and HSE faculty and students.
Watch video from the conference.
Day 1. Opening ceremony and presentation by Jorgen Weibull (Stockholm School of Economics).
Day 2. Presentation by Thomas Palfrey (California Institute of Technology)
Alexis Belianin spoke to us about the workshop:
- You and Fuad Aleskerov acted as the local organizers of this conference, along with other members of the Laboratory for experimental and behavioural economics and CAS HSE. How satisfied are you with the results?
- Honestly, I am very satisfied with this event. You know, generally at any scientific conference there are both some strong papers which report a clear scientific result and shed light onto the nature of social phenomena and are well-integrated into the literature;and weaker papers which do not satisfy these criteria. At our conference, the vast majority of the papers were the former. Another particular feature of our meeting was its ‘chamber'nature:the list of presenters was no larger than 15 people - many times less than in huge international conferences with hundreds of participants. The advantage of this small-scale format, however, is that we were able to give more time to presenters, and ample room for discussion during coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners. And of course, I have to mention the final round table on Saturday morning, in which participants shared their views on the interaction of the experimental and theoretical investigations in the field of human sciences. It was a brilliant finale and a true intellectual feast for participants and listeners.
Among the main results of the workshop, I must mention the following. Firstly, we were able to bring together a small, but very professional group of people who work in the field of modeling of rationality and experiments in this field. Among the participants, we should mention Jorgen Weibull, one of the strongest economic theorists of Europe, and until very recently - chairman of the Nobel committee in economics of the Swedish Academy of Sciences;Thomas Palfrey from the California Institute of Technology, also one of the leading experts in the world in the microeconomic theory and the experimental economics;and Maya Bar-Hilel, a true legend in the field of cognitive and behavioural psychology. And we had a great opportunity to not only listen and talk to researchers of such calibre, but also to establish academic contacts with them.
At the same time, we were pleased to see that our own work was treated by our guests as standing along side, not "behind"contemporary research agenda. This gives us good grounds to believe in future research contacts with our guests;and some of these are being developed right now. Last but not least, we were very pleased to see a lot of young people participating in our event- faculty members and students. Young researchers have joined the dialogue which economists and psychologists can lead about human behaviour, about the direction in which our science evolves. And this is vital, because the future of scientific thought and schools of thought depends not only, and maybe not so much, on our own results, but on those people who come with us and after us.
- This is the third annual international scientific conference. What distinguishes this event from the previous ones?
- The topics of the CAS conferences differ from year to year;the previous ones focused on macroeconomics and on political economy respectively. This year's event was initiated and organized by our small research team at the Laboratory for experimental and behavioural economics (http://epee.hse.ru), while CAS and NES, as usual, provided excellent administrative and academic support, including contributing some papers. Next year's topic will probably be different again, and we will contribute to its success as much as we can. Right now, however, our main task is to make the best possible use of the impetus given to behavioural and experimental research in Russia for the sake of promotion and development of this area in our country.
Marina Ivanova, HSE Web News Service
Photos of Victoria Silaeva