October 1st 2015

Jose Apesteguia and Gaël Le Mens, professors of the Department of Economics and Business at UPF, have obtained a grant in the second call of the grants for research projects awarded by the BBVA Foundation.

The second edition of the BBVA Foundation Grants to Researchers, Innovators and Cultural Creators aims to recognize and support individually people who are in intermediate stages of their careers, offering the opportunity to develop highly innovative projects with wide margins of freedom and flexibility in the management of the grant allocated.

This second public call has been highly competitive. It were submitted 1,900 applications, corresponding to eleven areas of knowledge, and there were awarded 63 grants with an average grant of 34,000 Euros, to carry out research projects in a period of 12 months.

The project of Professor Jose Apesteguia consists in building a model of individual decision making in economy which exceeds the limitations of the standard economic model. The model will take into account the systematic deviations that occur in empirical applications. His challenge is to incorporate in this model the possibility of error in decision making and in the variability in the election, so that is sufficiently flexible to be empirically tested and can serve as a basis for a new economic theory.

The research of Professor Gael Le Mens deals with the analysis of the behavior and the dynamics of the organizations. With this grant he proposes modeling and contrasting, through large-scale experiments, an issue of increasing importance: the behavior patterns in decisions within complex environments in which individuals process information and interact in online communities.