Center for Future Banking Seminar Series: “Behavioral Economics” with Drazen Prelec

ABSTRACT: This talk will take up the question of what consumers might ideally want from payment arrangements, going beyond the obvious transaction dimensions such as flexibility, convenience, speed, or privacy. Recent findings in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics suggest that payments and consumption are psychologically entangled in the mind of the consumer, and that satisfaction with a transaction method is influenced by the quality of the purchase decisions that the method implements. This has implications for the design of new payment systems, as will be discussed in the talk. 

WHO: Drazen Prelec, MIT Sloan School of Management 

WHEN: Thursday, December 18th from 2:00-3:00pm 

WHERE: E15-209 (Wiesner Room) 

WHAT: Center for Future Banking Seminar Series 

SEMINAR TITLE: “Behavioral Eocnomics” 

BIOGRAPHY: Drazen Prelec has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1991, and presently holds appointments in the Sloan School, the Economics Department, and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his Ph. D in experimental psychology and AB in applied mathematics from Harvard University  He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has received a number of research awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His research interests include decision theory, consumer behavior, marketing research, collective prediction mechanisms, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics.