The O’Donnell Center for Behavioral Economics aims to broaden the reach of behavioral economics. In particular, to foster novel research agendas, the center is home to the Behavioral Economics 3.0 IdeasHub.
The Behavioral Economics 3.0 IdeasHub provides an opportunity for faculty, graduate students, and young researchers to explore evidence and insights from fields outside of economics, such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology.
A list of readings for each semester is provided at the end of this article.
Current Readings
January 21
Guest speaker: Dr. Sarah Evans-Lacko, LSE
- Sick Individuals and Sick Populations (Rose)
- How scientifically valid is the knowledge base of global mental health? (Summerfield)
- Transforming mental health systems globally: principles and policy recommendations (Patel, et al.)
- Association between public views of mental illness and self-stigma among individuals with mental illness in 14 European countries (Evans-Lacko, et al.)
February 4
- Controllability over stressor decreases responses in key threat-related brain areas (Limbachia, et al.)
- Active avoidance: neural mechanisms and attenuation of Pavlovian conditioned responding (Boeke et al.)
- Agency and the Calibration of Motivated Behavior (Moscarello & Hartley)
February 25
- Modeling Imprecision in Perception, Valuation, and Choice (Woodford)
- Individual Risk Attitudes Arise from Noise in Neurocognitive Magnitude Representations (Barretto-Garcia et al.)
- Behavior Attenuation (Enke et al.)
March 4
Guest Speaker: Dr. Timothy Brown, UC Berkeley
Topic: Chronic Pain
- Reducing the prevalence of low-back pain by reducing the prevalence of psychological distress: Evidence from a natural experiment and implications for health care providers (Brown et al.)
- Discrimination hurts: The effect of discrimination on the development of chronic pain (Brown et al.)
- Cognition and Pain: A Review (Khera & Rangasamy)
Additional Suggested Readings:
- The FUTUREPAIN study: Validating a questionnaire to predict the probability of having chronic pain 7-10 years into the future (Brown & Lee)
- Open-Label Placebo Injection for Chronic Back Pain With Functional Neuroimaging: A Randomized Clinical Trial (Ashar, Sun, Knight, et al.)
- Placebos in chronic pain: evidence, theory, ethics, and use in clinical practice (Kaptchuk, Hemond, & Miller)
- Predicting placebo analgesia responses in clinical trials: where to look next? A meta-analysis of individual patient data (Lunde et al.)
- Delay and Effort-Based Discounting, and the Role of Bodily Awareness, In People Experiencing Long-Term Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study (Herman & Stanton)
- Neuroscience of Pain, Stress, and Emotion (al’Absi & Flaten)
March 18
- TBD
April 1
- TBD
April 22
- TBD
Past Readings
August 27
Guest speaker: Wan Chen Lin
- Experimental biology can inform our understanding of food insecurity (Wilbrecht, Lin, et al.)
- Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology (Lin, Liu, et al.)
- A role for adaptive developmental plasticity in learning and decision making (Lin, Delevich, Wilbrecht)
September 24
- Kevin Dorst’s “Stranger Apologies Blog”
- Rational Polarization by Kevin Dorst
- Section 5.0, The Predictable Theorem (only up to 5.1)
- Bayes is Back by Alexander Meehan and Snow Zhang
- Section 1.0, Introduction
Additional Readings: The remaining sections of Rational Polarization and Bayes is Back
October 1
Guest Speaker: Nina Beguš, Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society
- Introduction of her new book, Artificial Humanities
This meeting focused on the intersection of AI and the humanities. In particular, discussion focused on the ways in which our culture and institutions have, and will continue to, shape AI development.
October 15
Guest Speaker: Steven Piantadosi, Professor of Psychology and Head of colala (the computation and language lab) at the Helens Wills Neuroscience at UC Berkeley
- Chapters 1 & 2 of The Formal Foundation of Cognitive Science (book, forthcoming from MIT Press) ; Diverse mathematical knowledge among indigenous Amazonians
November 19
- Trauma, memory, and narrative based interventions
- Emotion regulation
March 5
Bayesian Models of Cognition: Chapters 1 and 7
March 19
- McLaughlin et al., “Causal Effects of the Early Caregiving Environment on Development of Stress Response Systems in Children“, 2015 PNAS
- Nelson et al., “How Early Experience Shapes Human Development: The Case of Psychosocial Deprivation“, 2019 Neural Plasticity
- Bucharest Early Intervention Project
April 2
- Undurraga et al., “Child stunting is associated with weaker human capital among native Amazonians (2018)”, American Journal of Human Biology 30 (1)
- Orticio et al., “Children flexibly adapt their evidentiary standards to their informational environment (2023)”, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45 (45)
- Orticio et al., “Beliefs are most swayed by social prevalence under uncertainty (2021), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
April 16
Guest speaker: Professor William Thompson
- Thompson et al, Complex Cognitive Algorithms Preserved by Selective Social Learning in Experimental Populations, Science 376, 95-98 (2022)
- Griffiths, Understanding Human Intelligence through Human Limitations, Trends in Cognitive Science 24, 873-883 (2020)
April 30
- Belsky et al, Genetic analysis of social-class mobility in five longitudinal studies, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (31) (2018)
Background Readings
- Chapter 9, paragraph “Disruption in Parenting” of the book “From Neurons to Neighborhood: The Science of Early Childhood Development”
- Gunnar and Quevedo, “The Neurobiology of Stress and Development”, 2005 Annual Review of Psychology
Oct 2
Oct 16
Dec 4
The Gray Area with Sean Hilling (podcast), Episode: Your Mind Needs Chaos
May 23
- Poverty, Depression, and Anxiety: Causal Evidence & Mechanisms (Ridley, Rao, et al)
- Cognitive Models of Depression (Beck)
May 9
- Social Media & Mental Health, Braghieri et al
- Surgeon General Advisory, Social Media & Youth mental health
- Surgeon General Warns that Social Media May Harm Children & Adolescents, NYT
- The Great Rewiring, Unplugged (Nature)
March 27
March 6
February 28
February 14
Interested?
The Behavioral Economics 3.0 IdeasHub is open to UC Berkeley PhD students who are able to commit to the time and assignments. The Group meets for one hour roughly every other week. In addition to completing the assigned readings, all participants are expected to submit three slides capturing the readings’ main take-aways, results, and relevance for economics research a day prior to the meeting.
Due to growing interest, the Center is exploring avenues to open selected meetings to a wider audience. Apply here