Social Science Space

Two economists whose work on how auctions work shone a much broader light on how people value and price goods and service have received the 2020 Nobel Prize in economics.

Over the last three decades randomized trials have become an increasingly popular way of testing interventions designed to address developmental challenges. But do RCTs generate reliable results – or even retard progress?

“Many people die without getting a transplant because there aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, living donor organs included. Sometimes, you might love someone enough to give him a kidney but you can’t give a kidney to the person you love, because kidneys have to be very well-matched. Kidney exchange is a way of getting some transplants done, even when patients and their donors are not well matched.”

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 (commonly known as the Nobel Prize for Economics) has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Through the award, the Nobel committee recognized both the significance of development economics in the world today and the innovative approaches developed by these three economists.

Two academics who have integrated what might have once seemed like non-economic externalities into economic models have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics. The winners are William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, cited for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, and Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, cited doing the same with technological innovations.

Richard Thaler was not the first proponent of behavioral economics to be awarded a Nobel Prize, notes Sergey Popov. But Thaler’s star turn came when the Great Recession and it orgy or irrationality brought a lot of attention to research that extensively cites the University of Chicago’s economist’s 40-year-long academic career.

Richard H. Thaler, the University of Chicago economist whose contributions linking psychology to the ‘dismal science’ caught the public’s eye in his co-authored bestselling book Nudge, has received this year’s Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Nobel laureate economist Al Roth explains to interview David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, giving a wealth of real-world examples.

As technology improves and organizations become more complex, the theory and practice of contract design will only increase in importance. As such, we owe, we owe a great debt to this year’s Nobel laureates in economics for giving us powerful tools to structure effective contracts.

Angus Deaton called for the applied microeconomists not to abandon economic theory in favor of experiments but instead to think more deeply about the consequences of economic theories and how they can be tested using real-world data. This is the approach he has followed throughout his career and what has led to him win a Nobel Prize.

The Nobel committee has awarded Princeton’s Angus Deaton ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.’ But in fact, he was awarded for building bridges – between disciplines, between theory and reality, between people.

This year’s winner of the not-quite Nobel Prize in economics once again demonstrates the triumph of the blackboard over the real world in what gets recognized — and that’s not good, argues David Spencer.