Economics area at IIMB to host a Behavioral Economics Workshop on 05 March 2026
Seminar by Prof. Yan Chen, University of Michigan School of Information
03 March, 2026, Bengaluru: The Economics area at IIM Bangalore will host a half-day Behavioral Economics Workshop in Classroom P-12, from 9:30 AM to 1:10 PM on 5 March 2026. The workshop will feature four research presentations followed by a seminar by Prof. Yan Chen, Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information.
The programme will begin with Prof. Jeevant Rampal, IIM Ahmedabad, presenting joint work with Shantanu Khanna on ‘Bureaucrat cadre assignment policies: Theory and evidence’. The second presentation on ‘Decoupling Taste-Based versus Statistical Discrimination in Elections’ by Prof. Anubhav Jha, Ashoka University, co-authored with A. de Albuquerque, F. Finan, L. Karpuska, and F. Trebbi.
Prof. Kalyani Chaudhuri, Ashoka University, in joint work with Anujit Chakraborty, will deliver the presentation on ‘Revisiting Gender Differences in Volunteering for Non-Promotable Tasks’. Prof. Priyoma Mustafi, Ahmedabad University, with K. Pun Winichakul, G. Lezama, M. Lepper, A. Wilson, D. Danz, and L. Vesterlund, will present research on ‘Effect size, Experimenter Demand and Inference’.
The workshop will conclude with a seminar titled ‘Group Identity and Belief Formation: A Microfoundation of Political Polarization’ by Prof. Yan Chen, University of Michigan School of Information. Based on online tests done before and during the 2020 US presidential election, the study investigates how group identity influences information processing and belief updating. The findings reveal that people are prepared to pay a monetary price to avoid information from political outgroups, and they give less weight to such information when revising ideas. An intervention that removes source labels reduces outgroup information avoidance by 50%, especially among strongly group-identified participants, indicating that a source-utility channel contributes to polarization.
About the Speaker
Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research spans behavioral and experimental economics, market and mechanism design, and public economics. She has served as Department Editor, Behavioral Economics and Decision Analysis, at Management Science (2018–2022) and as Advisory Editor at Games and Economic Behavior (2013–2020). One of her specialisations is designing theory-driven experiments. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a former president of the Economic Science Association (2015–2017) and a recipient of the 2019 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association and the 2020 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the University of Michigan.
Click here for the agenda: Behavioral Economics Workshop 2026
Economics area at IIMB to host a Behavioral Economics Workshop on 05 March 2026
Seminar by Prof. Yan Chen, University of Michigan School of Information
03 March, 2026, Bengaluru: The Economics area at IIM Bangalore will host a half-day Behavioral Economics Workshop in Classroom P-12, from 9:30 AM to 1:10 PM on 5 March 2026. The workshop will feature four research presentations followed by a seminar by Prof. Yan Chen, Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information.
The programme will begin with Prof. Jeevant Rampal, IIM Ahmedabad, presenting joint work with Shantanu Khanna on ‘Bureaucrat cadre assignment policies: Theory and evidence’. The second presentation on ‘Decoupling Taste-Based versus Statistical Discrimination in Elections’ by Prof. Anubhav Jha, Ashoka University, co-authored with A. de Albuquerque, F. Finan, L. Karpuska, and F. Trebbi.
Prof. Kalyani Chaudhuri, Ashoka University, in joint work with Anujit Chakraborty, will deliver the presentation on ‘Revisiting Gender Differences in Volunteering for Non-Promotable Tasks’. Prof. Priyoma Mustafi, Ahmedabad University, with K. Pun Winichakul, G. Lezama, M. Lepper, A. Wilson, D. Danz, and L. Vesterlund, will present research on ‘Effect size, Experimenter Demand and Inference’.
The workshop will conclude with a seminar titled ‘Group Identity and Belief Formation: A Microfoundation of Political Polarization’ by Prof. Yan Chen, University of Michigan School of Information. Based on online tests done before and during the 2020 US presidential election, the study investigates how group identity influences information processing and belief updating. The findings reveal that people are prepared to pay a monetary price to avoid information from political outgroups, and they give less weight to such information when revising ideas. An intervention that removes source labels reduces outgroup information avoidance by 50%, especially among strongly group-identified participants, indicating that a source-utility channel contributes to polarization.
About the Speaker
Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research spans behavioral and experimental economics, market and mechanism design, and public economics. She has served as Department Editor, Behavioral Economics and Decision Analysis, at Management Science (2018–2022) and as Advisory Editor at Games and Economic Behavior (2013–2020). One of her specialisations is designing theory-driven experiments. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a former president of the Economic Science Association (2015–2017) and a recipient of the 2019 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association and the 2020 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the University of Michigan.
Click here for the agenda: Behavioral Economics Workshop 2026