Living with scarcity - in money, time, or other resources - brings about a unique mindset, and predictable behaviors.  It leads us to focus on the resource that's scarce, often at the expense of other considerations.  It can make us less effective and even less smart.

This talk will review some recent research into the psychology that emerges in contexts of scarcity, and the decisions - some commendable, others problematic - that ensue.  Special attention will be paid to poverty, and to policy implications.

La conferencia será dictada en inglés sin traducción simultánea.

A cargo del Prof. Eldar Shafir, PhD. The Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

His research focuses on descriptive analyses of decision making, and on issues related to behavioral economics, with an emphasis on how people make judgments and decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty. Of particular interest is the contrast between normative and descriptive theories, and their implications for policy and potentially for the law.  Most recently, he has focused on decision making in the context of poverty and, more generally, on the application of behavioral research to policy.  He is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and of the Academic Advisory Board of the Behavioral Finance Forum, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Faculty Associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, and co-director of Ideas42, a social science R&D lab. He has held visiting positions, among others, at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, The Kennedy School of Government, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies, and Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University.