November 6th 2015

Professor Ernst Fehr, from UBS International Center of Economics in Society and University of Zurich, opened the 2015-2016 academic year at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences of the UPF with the welcoming talk entitled "Degustibus est disputandum. The Emerging Science of Preference Formation".

The ceremony was held on Wedneday October 7th, 2015 at the Auditorium of the Ciutadella Campus.

Professor Fehr talked about how in modern economics individuals’ preferences are taken as given. They are the unmoved movers of action. Preferences are, however, formed by social, economic and biological forces. This lecture documents recent insights into preference formation and how this helps explain hitherto unexplained (or insufficiently explained), yet important, phenomena such as the impact of poverty on time and risk preferences, the impact of asset price booms and busts on risk aversion, the role of business culture on (dis)honest behavior in the financial industry, the impact of parents’ and friends on children’s pro-sociality, the psychological sources of war and conflicts, or the impact of nuclear catastrophes on risk taking and time discounting.