Decision making, how to change it and why it matters
About the lecture
The lecture will briefly discuss how the experimental and behavioural study of decision making can have important policy implications.
It will focus on three sample applications from Professor Zizzo's research:
- the effect of social comparisons on technological innovation adoption;
- consumer inattention leading to insufficient switching in markets for services, and the implications this has for consumer policy, based on laboratory experiments; and
- the effect of pricing and nudge (signposting) interventions on the purchase of healthier cereals and soft drinks, based on an online experiment with a representative sample of the UK population.
Order of proceedings
| Time | Activity |
| 4pm | Event registration opens |
| 4.15pm | Welcome addresss - Professor Andrew Griffith, Executive Dean, Faculty of Business Economics and Law |
| 4.20pm | Keynote presentation - Professor Daniel Zizzo, Academic Dean and Head of School, School of Economics |
| 5.05pm | Q&A |
| 5.15pm | Networking |
| 6pm | Event closes |
About the presenter
Professor Daniel Zizzo is the Academic Dean and Head of School for the School of Economics. He is a Research Associate in the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (CAMA) at Australian National University and a member of the UEA Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) and of the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe).
Professor Zizzo is also a Coordinating Editor of Theory and Decision and, among his other roles, he is both a Fellow of the ESRC Peer Review College and a member of the ESRC’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) Peer Review College. He is also an Associate Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and an ARC Assessor. Professor Zizzo was also Secretary of the Conference of Heads of University Departments of Economics (CHUDE), a committee of the Royal Economic Society, for six years.
Professor Zizzo is primarily an experimental and behavioural economist, and his research is motivated by the search for more realistic empirical and theoretical foundations of economic decision making, using mainly experimental, but also analytical and computational methods as required. He considers himself a mainstream economist, but one interested in pushing forward the boundaries of mainstream economics, and one firmly committed to a wider perspective as an interdisciplinary social scientist.
Prior to joining the School in October 2018, Professor Zizzo was Dean of Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University and a Professor of Economics at Newcastle University Business School.
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About Annual Colin Clark Lecture
The Colin Clark Lecture is our most prestigious annual lecture and is now in its 28th year. The Colin Clark Memorial Lecture is held each year to recognise Dr Colin Clark’s outstanding contribution to the field of economics. Dr Colin Clark was a UQ Economics academic whose work on national income accounting was fundamentally important to the development of macroeconomics and to the approach of John Maynard Keynes. Dr Clark's greatest contribution to economics was his pioneering role in the construction of national accounts.
Previous speakers have included Professor Paul Schreyer, Deputy Chief Statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); Professor Erwin Diewert from the University of British Columbia; Professor Warwick McKibbon from ANU; and Professor Bart Van Ark from the Royal University of Groningen and the Conference Board (New York, USA). Over the last few years in particular, the School welcomed leading economist and Harvard Professor Dale W. Jorgenson as the guest speaker in 2014, in 2015 Professor Alison Booth, Australian National University presented a lecture entitled Gender in Economics: A Story in the Making. In 2016 the Robert A. Bandeen Professor of Economics Leslie Marx of Duke University presented a lecture advising us on “How to defend against potential collusion by your suppliers”.