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 Colin Clark Memorial Lecture
The Colin Clark Memorial Lecture is our most prestigious annual event, now in its 29th year.
It 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
Year | Speaker | |
---|---|---|
Inaugural | 1991 | Emeritus Professor Jim O.N. Perkins |
Second | 1992 | Emeritus Professor Heinz Wolfgang Arndt |
Third | 1993 | Professor Peter Groenewegen |
Fourth | 1994 | Emeritus Professor H.M. (Ted) Kolsen |
Fifth | 1995 | Professor Warren Hogan |
Sixth | 1996 | Dr Peter Crossman |
Seventh | 1997 | Professor Geoffrey Harcourt |
Eighth | 1998 | Mr Ian Castles |
Ninth | 1999 | Mr Ted Evans |
Tenth | 2000 | Professor Bob Gregory |
Eleventh | 2001 | Dr Peter McCawley |
Twelfth | 2002 | Mr Ian Macfarlane |
Thirteenth | 2003 | Mr Angus Maddison |
Fourteenth | 2004 | Professor Allan Fels Ao |
Fifteenth | 2005 | Professor Stan Metcalfe CBE |
Sixteenth | 2006 | Professor Alan Heston |
Seventeenth | 2007 | Professor Ian Harper |
Eighteenth | 2008 | Mr Gary Banks AO |
Nineteenth | 2009 | Dr David Gruen |
Twentieth | 2010 | Professor Erwin Diewert |
Twenty-first | 2011 | Professor Stephen King |
Twenty-second | 2012 | Professor Ross Garnaut |
Twenty-third | 2013 | Professor John Quiggin |
Twenty-fourth | 2014 | Professor Dale Jorgensen |
Twenty-fifth | 2015 | Professor Alison Booth |
Twenty-sixth | 2016 | Professor Leslie M. Marx |
Twenty-seventh | 2017 | Professor John Quiggin |
Twenty-eighth | 2018 | Professor Daniel Zizzo |
Twenty-ninth | 2019 | Professor Alicia Rambaldi |