The Financial Economics Institute, the 11th and newest institute at CMC, will launch its new speaker series with guest Richard Thaler, the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago, who will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, Oct. 7. Thaler's lecture, Investor Behavior and Public Policy: The Approach of a Libertarian Paternalist, begins at 6:45 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Thaler, best known for documenting behavioral anomalies related to financial markets, works in the area of behavior finance, a branch of economics that challenges the neoclassical economic assumption of rational behavior. Janet Smith, the Von Tobel Professor of Economics at CMC, and director of FEI and The Robert A. Day 4 + 1 BA/MBA Program, says that when information is costly to gather and when there are cognitive limitations on processing information, the result may be choices that do not follow economists' predictions of rationality.
"We were interested in having an inaugural speaker who would be provocative and challenge standard ways of thinking about economic phenomena," Smith says. "We hope that after hearing Professor Thaler the audience will think about economic phenomena in a different, richer way, including the consequences for capital markets of behavioral anomalies and limitations in investors' cognitive abilities."
The FEI Speaker Series will feature a variety of guests throughout the academic yearmost notably social scientists who think about financial markets in original, creative ways, Smith says.
Professor Thaler also has served as research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics at the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management. For additional information visit the Financial Economics Institute web site at: http://fei.claremontmckenna.edu/events/.