Title : "Are More Choices Better and Other Tales About Decision- making?"
Day & Date : Friday, July 27, 2018
Time & Venue: 5:15 pm at Hall No. 21, 2nd Floor, VMCC
Abstract: We live in world where there is no dearth of choices in anything from ordering a cup of tea, buying a pair of jeans to selecting the right retirement portfolio. The idea that more is better stems from a simple mathematical truism, an unconstrained maximum can never be worse than a constrained maximum. Using a set of simple economic experiments, this talk explores the idea of whether giving people more choices actually helps them make better choices. Do gender, education and age play a role in this? Do groups make better decisions than individuals? After all as a part of group individuals may decide to leave the burden of making decisions to the other members of the group. Finally, could we think of designing choice architectures that help people make better decisions?
About the Speaker: Prof. Sudipta Sarangi is the Department Head and Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech from where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2000. His research interests include experimental and behavioral economics and network theory. He is a research associate of DIW Berlin, GATE, University of Lyon-St. Etienne and the Lima School of Economics and has been a consultant to organizations like the World Bank and FAO. He currently serves as a Co-Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.