Program Outline
The Sumer School classes will focus on:
Dual system of decision-making – are we emotional or rational driven
People do not make decisions based solely on rational analyses as this would be ineffective and non-optimal in a world of limited resources and time constraints. Moreover, as Damasio has showed, in the absence of emotions, cold rational reasoning can lead to worse outcomes than decision influenced by fear, anger or other affective states. Therefore dual system of decision-making seems to be a more efficient way to integrate emotions with rational deliberation. While this dual system serves us well in many everyday situations, it can also lead to errors. The current research helps us understand these systematic errors, predict them and even avoid them.
Dishonesty of honest people – bastards within nice people
From the point of view of traditional economic theories, decisions to violate law or act dishonestly are motivated solely by a cost-benefit analysis: what can I get by criminal or immoral behavior and what negative consequences I risk (in the case I got caught). Behavioral economics expands this view substantially: based on many psychological studies, it seems obvious that dishonest behavior is influenced by a range of many other subtle factors, from motivation to have a positive self-image, saliency of social and formal norms, to emotional states experienced in the moment of decision making. We will also discuss how to use all this knowledge in order to make people more honest in a workplace and in everyday situations.
Fairness – killing the killer
Yet another departure from traditional rational model of human being has been developed by reconsidering views on fairness in our decision-making. A certain behavior, although being rational and benefiting all concerned, is rejected by those involved as repulsive and not acceptable. Is cutting wages during the economic downturn fairer than laying people off? Can you sell the last bottle of water you brought to the Sahara desert for more than the earlier one without being lynched? Similar questions posed in classes on economics might have simple answers, however when you ask general public, you might be surprised for getting rather different answers. The course will discuss and analyze the role of fairness in human decision-making as well as valuation of these decisions by others.
Sources of the information – hoaxes or reliable information
Biases identified by behavioral research prove to have wide applications in everyday life. In general, people use the mass media as a crucial source of information and believe in unbiasedness of media, but it is not always the case. For example, some media supply rather leftist while the other stick to the rightest news.
In the same time, media supply great amount of data thanks to which we are able to study the biases of “old media” as well as new social media such as Facebook. The course answers questions of why you should read newspapers you don’t like, why your Google account makes you dumber or how to take advantage of information provided by new media.
Behavioral errors in organizations – being a very happy employee (or employer)
We will present an overview of empirical evidence from the behavioral organizational economics which will extend standard model of worker’s behavior. We will emphasize four stylized extensions: the worker’s reference dependent decision-making, influence of reciprocity between an employer and an employee (gift-exchange theory), importance of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation (and possible crowding-out effect), and the impact of relative performance compensation on the cooperation, reciprocity and sabotage in firms. The course will also address main (mis)behavioral regularities in managers’ decision-making, mostly on their over-optimism, leadership styles and corporate culture.
Experiment
The most effective way of learning is experience. Employing knowledge and tools provided during the lectures students will be required to conduct their own experiment and present its results before their colleagues. Students will be welcome to come up with their own creative ideas and solutions in experiment proposals and will be supported in the actual practical realization of experiments. In addition to utilization of their existing knowledge students will gain understanding of practical problems and limitations of experimental design.
Schedule (Preliminary)
SATURDAY 1st July
12.00 – 18.00 Registration
19.00 – 19.30 Orientation / Ice Breaking Session /Egle Havrdova/
20.00 Welcome Dinner /Restaurant “Klempirna”, Záhřebská 19/
SUNDAY 2nd July
9.00 – 9.30 Introduction to Summer School Program
9.30 – 10.45 Lecture 1
10.45 – 11.00 Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.15 Lecture 2
12.30 – 14.00 Lunch/Restaurant “Klempirna”/
15.00 – 18.00 Tours of Prague
MONDAY 3rd July
9.30 – 10.45 Lecture 3
10.45 – 11.00 Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.15 Lecture 4
12.30 – 14.00 Lunch/Restaurant “Klempirna”/
14.00 – 15.15 Lecture 5
15.15 – 15.30 Coffee Break
15.30 – 16.45 Lecture 6
18.00 – 20.00 Happy Hour & Happy Hour Talk. /Pragovka. Multi Art & Culture District, Kolbenova 34A/
TUESDAY 4th July
09.30 – 10.45 Lecture 7
10.45 – 11.00 Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.15 Lecture 8
12.30 – 14.00 Lunch/Restaurant “Klempirna”/
14.00 – 15.15 Workshop 1
15.15 – 15.30 Coffee Break
15.30 – 16.45 Workshop 2
17.00 – 18.30 Guest Lecture
WEDNESDAY 5th July
Free Day!!! Pragulic/ Trip to Kutna Hora or Karlštejn/ Exhibition/ Zoo/
19.00 Culture Night in Prague on the roof of the DOX+ multifunction hall/
Evergreen Open Air Cinema
THURSDAY 6th July
09.30 – 10.45 Lecture 9
10.45 – 11.00 Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.15 Lecture 10
12.30 – 14.00 Lunch/Restaurant “Klempirna”/
14.00 – 15.15 Workshop 3
15.15 – 15.30 Coffee Break
15.30 – 16.45 Workshop 4
21.00 – 23.00 Boat Tour
FRIDAY 7th July
10.00 – 11.15 Lecture 11
11.15 – 11.30 Coffee Break
11.30 – 12.45 Workshop 5
12.45 Free Time
17.30 Departure for Gröbeho vila
18.00 Final Remarks & FAREWELL PARTY/Gröbeho vila, Havlíčkovy sady,
Praha 2/
SATURDAY 8th July
Departure
Faculty
Marek Havrda, Ph.D.
Marek is co-founder of Prague Summer Schools. Since 2014 he is a member of Impact Assessment Board an advisory body to the Czech Government. He worked in the European Commission (Health and Consumers Directorate General) where he helped design better EU regulation (contributed to the first uses of behavioral economics for policy making at the EU level). Before joining the European Commission he directed consultancy, which worked for: i.a. Czech Government, KPMG and GE, and led Prague-based think-tank promoting good-governance. Now back in Prague working on a start-up connecting behavioral research and information technology – if interested please visit neopas.com . Marek has also served as advisor to several Government Departments, currently advising the Czech Ministry on Education, Youth and Sports. Academics: MAs in Economics and International Studies and Ph.D. in Public and Social Policy (Charles University, Prague), MA in Sociology (Lancaster University / CEU), MPA (Warwick Business School), Fulbright Visiting Researcher (Johns Hopkins University). Marek co-authored a book on anti-corruption strategies using behavioral insights.
Matěj Sucha
Matej studied at Copenhagen University in Denmark and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He has worked for several years at the Vienna Insurance Group (VIG), where he left in 2015 and founded the consulting firm MINDWORX.
MINDWORX specializes in behavioral economics and its applications in consumer behavior and managerial decision-making. At present he acts as a Managing Partner at MINDWORX. He teaches at Comenius University and lectures at conferences on the use of behavioral knowledge in various business spheres.He has a quantitative background in Actuarial mathematics with work experience both home and abroad. His expertise is among others consumer psychology and influence.
Lukáš Tóth
Lukas is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Amsterdam and a co-founder of Behavio, a company that focuses on commercial applications of behavioral testing for companies and government entities. He has previously studied IES FSV UK and the Tinbergen Institute and has given invited talks on topics ranging from Economics and Philosophy to Economics of Regulation and Behavioral Economics. He coauthored part of Economics of Good and Evil with Tomas Sedlacek and is a martial arts enthusiast.
Jaromír Mazák
Jaromir works as a lecturer and researcher at the Charles University. His professional interests include political participation and research methodology. He is involved in a partnership project of the Charles University and the Czech Television called Trends of Czechia, which maps electoral preferences and public opinion on topical issues. He also teaches courses about data and analytical processing of information for the Czech Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. He will be coming to the summer school straight from his present academic visit at the University of Oxford.
Michal Plevka
Michal is a psychology major. He was always fascinated by how our minds work and what drives our behavior. That’s why he started his internship in MINDWORX even before he finished university. In fact, he was Matej’s first colleague. From the beginning, he’s been interested in behavior change – didn’t matter if it was buying behavior, recruiting, or even changing behavior of employees. Over the years he has led some of the most important MINDWORX projects – increasing sales and conversions for banks, insurance companies and telco businesses among others. He is now a behavioral strategy director for he is always trying to expand the knowledge of himself and his colleagues and use it to help their clients. When he’s not in the office, you’ll most likely find him at gym (trying to burn all the chocolate that he eats), shooting a bow (well, trying to), or learning how to play a piano.
Ondrej Pesout
Ondrej’s research focuses on implementing self-regulated learning (SRL) and metacognition into regular educational practice. In 2017, Ondrej earned a doctorate in Educational Psychology at North Carolina State University. Since then, he narrowed his research concentration on the use of metacognitive skills across learning domains. From 2018, ha has been employed as an assistant professor at UJEP. Apart from teaching educational psychology, he have worked on designing metacognitive skill interventions that promote students’ performance in academic tasks. Last year, a new collaboration with colleagues from UJEP and CZU steered his attention on examining the connection between metacognitive monitoring skills and creative thinking. Metacognition could be the new educational avenue in unleashing individuals’ creative thinking potential.
Justina Ivanauskaite
Justina is a lead data scientist at MSD Prague with background in statistics and mathematics. At her current role she is responsible for building strategy for data science team, leading delivery of data science projects from idea to business realization. She has applied her knowledge in wide range of projects: vaccine research, forecasting, promotion response modeling, or animal health. Justina is interested in creating data science solutions that bring value to the client, with emphasis on reusability and reproducibility. She likes to explore business challenges and suggest methodologies how to achieve desired targets using data science.
Adam Klocek
Mgr. Adam Klocek is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. His major interest is complexity science applied to psychotherapy. Currently, Adam was awarded with the selective university grant, which allowed him to work on application of network psychometrics to model the dynamics of several mechanisms of change in group therapy setting. Besides academic career, Adam is working as the main evaluator of the pilot KiVa Antibullying Program within the research organization Schola Empirica, in the Czech Republic. In his spare time, Adam plays violoncello, writes short stories and loves long-distance tracks with good people.