Seminars of Interest at Columbia

Monday, November 18th

2:30 pm to 3:45 pm - International Affairs Building 1101
Economic Theory Workshop - Sarah Auster (University of Mannheim) 
Robust Bidding and Revenue in Descending Price Auctions with Christian Kellner

Tuesday, November 19th 

12:30 pm to 1:30 pm - Uris 329
PhD Student Seminar - Mohammadreza Bolandnazar

12:30 pm to 1:45 pm - Uris 331
Macroeconomics Lunch Group - Jen-Jen La'O

12:30 pm to 2:00 pm - Uris 332
Management Seminar - Uriel Haran (Ben-Gurion University of Negev)
Achievers, Not Winners: Guilt Inhibits Competitive Motivation

2:15 pm to 3:45 pm - International Affairs Building 1101
Industrial Organization and Strategy - Speaker TBD

4:15 pm to 5:45 pm - International Affairs Building 1101
Money-Macro Workshop - Cristina Arellano (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis)
Momentary Policy and Sovereign Risk in Emerging Economies (NK-Defaut) with Yan Bai and Gabriel Mihalache

Wednesday, November 20th

12:30 pm to 1:45 pm - Uris 142
Finance Free Lunch (Faculty Only) - Tania Babina 

4:00 pm to 5:00 pm - Schermerhorn 614
Psychology Colloquium - David Reddish (University of Minnesota) 
The Neurophysiology of Precommitment to Avoid Sunk Costs - Evidence From Mice, Rats, and Humans

4:05 pm to 5:35 pm - International Affairs Building 1101
Applied Microeconomics Seminar - Michael Dinerstein (University of Chicago)
Human Capital Depreciation

Thursday, November 21st

12:30 pm to 1:45 pm - Uris 140
Finance Seminar - Phil Strahan (Boston College) 
Bank Stress Testing: Public Interest or Regulatory Capture? (with Thomas Ian Schneider and Jun Yang)

12:30 pm to 1:45 pm - Uris 306
Microeconomics Faculty Lunch - Laura Boudreau
Social Norms and Firm Productivity

Friday, November 22nd

10:30 am to 11:30 am - Uris 303
Accounting Seminar - Peter Demerjian (University of Illinois at Chicago)


Article of the Week

For Choices Involving Uncertainty, the Brain Simplifies the Math that Drives Our Decisions

Researchers at Dartmouth College have found that the way humans make decisions under cases of uncertainty mirror the simplified decision making process adopted by primates. In a study of 7 rhesus macaques (320,000 trials) and 100 undergraduate students (50,000 trials) participants where tasked with choosing between two options that each had an explicit reward and probability. In this case both monkeys and humans multiplied the reward by the probability and chose whichever was higher. When the experiment was conducted again without explicitly giving the participants the probability (forcing them to learn the probability through experience) both monkeys and humans adopted an additive approach to decision-making, weighting both the amount and estimated probability and adding them together.  This approach placed more weight on the amount and less on the probability than the multiplicative method did.