Behavioural Environmental Economics Course+Workshop 2022
Overview
About Course
We are now offering this course for the fourth time thanks to the people who trusted me from the beginning and accepted to be part of it. After receiving the best PhD course prize in 2018, it was offered again in 2019. Yet, we had to skip the year 2020 due to Covid-19. Then we offered the course online in 2021, and it worked well. You can find out more about the previous years' using the following links: 2018 , 2019, 2021. More information about the community is here.
We also have a group called BEEn (Behavioural Environmental Economics Network) which aims to bring scholars together working on issues related to environmental and resource economics from a behavioural perspective. BEEn collects and disseminate information about related conferences, research and announcements. If you want to learn more about the group and become a member, click here.
This year, the course will be given online again.
The course aims to provide understanding of topics in environmental and resource economics from a behavioural economics perspective. Students will learn how to apply the theory and the methods such as field and laboratory experiments to the environmental issues to discover how individuals actually behave, and how normative theories and frameworks fail to capture the actual behaviour.
There is no tuition fee.
Here is the reading list for BEE2022
Level
Masters and PhD
Credits
7.5 ECTS
There will be a take home exam after the lecture period, you will be given plenty of time to complete it. In order to take the exam, you are required to attend the lectures during the lecture period 28 November-7 December 2022.
Structure
This course composed of lectures and student seminars to get feedback from the lecturers and other students. Download Program.
Target Audience
The course especially invites graduate students who are working on topics in environmental economics from a behavioural economics perspective. Master students, early career researchers and students from other fields of social sciences are also welcomed to participate in the course. While applying for the course, each student will be asked to write a max. 300 words text describing their current work and research interests. The text will be used in selection process and if accepted to allocate the student's seminar to the related section.
Prerequisites
The course is specifically aimed at PhD students within the field of social sciences in particular economics. Knowledge in basic microeconomics and good knowledge in English is vital to be able to follow the course.
Time and Location
28 November 2022 - 7 December 2022; ONLINE
Lecture days: November 28th, 29th, 30th and December 1st, 6th, 7th (6 days in total).
Application
How to Apply
Course page on university website
General questions on application, Dr. Chandra Krishnamurthy: chandra.kiran@slu.se
Specific questions on the course, Dr. Oben Bayrak: obenbayrak@sabanciuniv.edu
Lecturers
Prof. Arild Angelsen
Arild Angelsen is a professor of economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). He has over the past two decades done extensive research and published on causes of tropical deforestation, and its interaction with poverty, tenure and government policies. Recent work deals with how efforts to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) can be included in a global climate regime, and the national strategies and policies needed to achieve REDD+. He has edited three REDD+ books that have become standard references in the debate. Angelsen was global coordinator of the Poverty Environment Network (PEN), a CIFOR-led research programme collecting detailed information from 8 000 households in 24 developing countries on forest uses and management. He has also used field experiments to study human behaviour and the impact of policy interventions for sustainable resource use. He has broad field experience from Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa, and is editor of a book on field research methods. Personal Web
Prof. Eline van der Heijden
Eline van der Heijden is Professor of Experimental Economics and member of the Tilburg Sustainability Center at Tilburg University. She began conducting experiments research during her promotion research and has since then done experimental and behavioral research on a wide range of subjects such as public goods and other social dilemma situations, the role of time, risk and social preferences in behavior, and leadership. She has experience with lab experiments, with large scale online experiments among a representative sample of the Dutch population, as well as field experiments. Van der Heijden uses these experiments to answer more fundamental research questions, but also to study more applied policy questions for various Dutch ministries, the OECD and the EU. In the past five years she has conducted a number of experimental lab and field studies in the field of environmental economics, including research into investments in energy-efficient technologies for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), households in the field of sustainable consumption, dynamic coordination games, and payments for ecosystem services schemes. Personal Web
Dr. Sara le Roux
Dr. Sara le Roux is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Oxford Brookes University. Her main research interests include the theoretical and experimental analysis of individual’s perception of ambiguity and decision choices made by individuals in the presence of ambiguity. Currently a number of policy questions involve ambiguity, in particular, potential threats resulting from climate change and environmental damage. Dr. le Roux uses experiments to analyse whether individuals make optimal decisions when faced by uncertain weather events, and if individuals can be “nudged” towards making better decisions. Personal Web
Dr. Therese Lindahl
After completing her PhD in Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics 2005, she joined the research staff at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. She became one of the Beijer program leaders, a position which she still holds today, for Behavior, Economics and Nature Network (BENN) (2010). The aim of her research is to generate a better understanding of human behavior (drivers, motivators and actions) in social-ecological systems, which can range from the individual and collective behavior of resource users facing different forms of social- ecological conditions (such as more or less predictable abrupt ecosystem changes, different market conditions etc.), to the (un)sustainable behavior of the average citizen/consumer. She employs a mix of experimental (lab and field), empirical and theoretical (mainly game theory) methods in her research. Lately she has also been combining these with social simulation (Agent-Based Models). Personal Web
Dr. Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy
Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Forest Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Economics (SLU) at Umeå. He is an environmental and resource economist with interests relating to understanding how energy markets function and economic policies for regulating pollution and enhancing natural resource conservation, including the question of discounting and natural resource management with regime shifts. He uses both empirical and theoretical methods in his research. He has also been engaged on work related to transportation in the recent past, including on evaluating the extent to which ride hailing firms such as Uber affect air pollution and traffic congestion. Personal Web
Dr. Jessica Barker
Jessica Barker is an Affiliated Researcher at Aarhus University's Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark. Currently living in Alaska, she is a Public Health Data Analyst for the State government, and advises the Alaska Vaccine Task Force on behavioural economics. Prior to this, she worked at the Behavioural Insights Team in London, where she was a member of the Energy, Environment & Sustainability team, focusing in particular on promoting sustainable food consumption and conservation behaviour. Her background is in evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology, and she spent two postdoctoral fellowships investigating when and why people - and other animals - behave pro-socially.
Dr. Camilla Widmark
Camilla Widmark (Senior researcher), is mainly doing research and teaching as well as administrative issues at the Department of Forest Economics (vice head of department). From January 1st, 2017, Camilla is head of office for EFINORD (The North European Office of the European Forest Institute). Camilla is mainly doing teaching in forest policy, but also in business administration and economics. In research the focus is mainly on land use policy, land use conflicts, especially focusing on common pool resources, governance issues, ecosystem services and forest policy, especially evaluation of forest policy. At present the Future Forests program's project on evaluation of the Swedish Forestry Model is in its final stages, while the FP 7 ERA-NET SUMFOREST funded project POLYFORES (Decision-making Support for Forest Ecosystem Services in Europe) is starting December 2016, where Camilla is doing research as well as coordinating the project. Camilla has also during 2016 and 2017 been appointed to the High Level Expert Panel on Food Security and Nutrition dealing with Sustainable forestry for food security and nutrition. Personal Web
Dr. Oben K. Bayrak
Oben Bayrak designed the course in 2018 and offered it in 2018 and 2019 together with all of the lecturers. The course/event received the best PhD course in 2018 from SLU. Oben Bayrak’s research is in behavioural economics and can be classified as both theoretical and experimental. His research focuses on preference imprecision, anomalies of standard economic theory, behavioral biases and decision making under uncertainty. With John Hey, he developed a new decision theory for decisions under risk known as Dispersion-Skewness Theory of decisions under risk. The relevant paper was published in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 2020. As shown in the paper, the new theory outperforms many prominent theories in the literature in terms of goodness of fit and shows a reasonable performance in predictive ability. It can incorporate the prominent anomalies of standard theory such as the Allais paradox, the valuation gap, and preference reversals, and also the behavioural patterns observed in experiments that cannot be explained by Rank Dependent Utility Theory. Personal Web
Content
First Day
28 Nov 2022
On behavioural insights and environmental economics, by Oben Bayrak
The focus will be individual decision making, by focusing on an introduction to behavioral economics such as behavioral biases, methodology and examples of experiments. Then, discussing prominent theories particularly and frequently observed behavioural patterns in economic experiments. Main discussion will be formed around the question of how do we interpret behavioural insights in the context of environmental economics. Read more about my research profile.
Second Day
29 Nov 2022
Framed field experiments, by Arild Angelsen
Prof. Arild Angelsen’s focus on Framed Field Experiments (FFEs): Since 2000 (Cardenas), a series of FFEs on natural resource use and management in developing countries have been conducted. FFEs have, compared to lab experiments, a realistic task (e.g. harvesting of trees) with a relevant population (e.g. real forest users) and conducted in the participants’ natural environment. The experiments are usually framed as a common pool resource game (CPR), creating a social dilemma between individual collective payoffs. The lecture aims to, first, give a broad overview of FFEs, some typical resource management situations, and possible policies. Second, it will summarize the experimental studies and the main (policy) conclusions that can be drawn from these
Incorporating evolutionary insights into behavioural environmental economics by Jessica Barker
The main contribution of behavioural economics has been to show that individuals often do not exhibit behaviour consistent with our predictions about how ‘rational’ agents should behave. This has revolutionised our understanding of human behaviour, and has also had major impact on policymaking, through its use by government behavioural science units. However, the focus of behavioural economics has largely been descriptive, cataloguing an ever-growing but inconsistently categorised list of biases and heuristics that have been uncovered. To make sense of this list, and to allow us to use our knowledge of behaviour to better design interventions to promote pro-environmental behaviour, we need to incorporate an understanding of why people behave the way they do. Evolutionary biology provides just such a perspective on human (and other animal) behaviour. For any question about why we see a given behaviour, there are four complementary answers (often referred to as Tinbergen’s four levels of analysis). Firstly, we can point to the proximate psychological mechanisms that caused the behaviour, such as feelings of risk aversion. Secondly, we can describe the developmental mechanisms over an individual’s lifetime, such as learning from parents or peers. Thirdly, we can explain human behaviour from its origins in other species. Fourthly, we can analyse the effects of behaviour on an individual’s evolutionary fitness, and ask why that behaviour has been maintained by natural selection. It is this fourth type of explanation that should be incorporated more into behavioural environmental economics, as it sheds light on what types of behaviour are considered ‘rational’, can help us make more consistent predictions about how individuals should behave in different context, and can guide us in designing better interventions.
Third Day
30 Nov 2022
Adding ambiguity into the context, by Sara Le Roux
Dr. Sara le Roux focusses on the concept of Equilibrium under Ambiguity (EUA). Then the lecture proceeds to apply the equilibrium concept to analyze games that simulate the effects of climate change in various choice situations: Mitigation: We will firstly model the ambiguity countries face while coordinating in a manner that would mitigate harmful emissions that cause climate change. Adaptation: Next we will study the effects of ambiguity on individuals deciding whether to invest in infrastructure that will adapt to the harmful effects of climate change, such that they can prevent losses due to climate change catastrophes. Insurance: Finally, alongside mitigation and adaptation mechanisms, we must consider insuring optimally in the face of ambiguous climate change catastrophes that can be viewed as low probability/high impact events.
Fourth Day
1 Dec 2022
Economic experiments and ecological systems, by Therese Lindahl
Dr. Therese Lindahl's focus is the value added of using experiments to study social ecological systems. The lecture will be about exploring the value added of using experiments to study social-ecological systems. She will first talk about controlled behavior experiments, where the specific emphasis is typically on capturing relevant features of ecosystem dynamics such as regime shifts and their inherent uncertainties, spatially distributed resources, asymmetrically distributed resources, resource interdependencies. These experiments are often applied to common pool resource settings, they have been performed both in lab and in field settings and we will cover both types of studies. She will also talk briefly about the value added of using social simulation experiments to study social-ecological systems, especially when they are used in combination with controlled behavioral experiments.
Fifth Day
6 Dec 2022
Environmental dilemmas and coordination games, by Elin van der Heijden
Prof. Eline van der Heijden’s lecture starts with a short introduction to several types of environmental problems and briefly reviews how some of these environmental social dilemmas have been studied experimentally and discusses some recent contributions, both of lab and field experiments. Then, discussing some specific topics in more detail: cooperation in (dynamic) coordination games, provision of environmental conversation by means of payments for ecosystem services, the role of leadership. Focus is on instruments that can be used to improve coordination and cooperation.
Sixth Day
7 Dec 2022
Behavioural Economics and the Environment: An Overview and some Welfare-related reflections, by Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy
This lecture will begin with a short introduction to the basic types of environmental problems of interest to this course, with particular focus on the theme of the rational individual and collective decision making for environmentally relevant goods, with both the choice and the mechanism context to be explored. A few real-world policies will be used as motivating examples for individual decisions and collective decision making and the associated policies. A discussion of welfare, formal and informal, along with paternalism, will be presented. Finally, some specific illustrations and real-world examples will be presented for how the postulated simple rational behaviour can differ in reality from expectations. Attention will be drawn to the challenges involved in identifying deviations from basic rationality assumption and “conditioning factors” involved in many contexts.