VCU news

By Leila Ugincius

The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business is hosting two international conferences this month.

The North American meetings of the Economic Science Association and the Society of Experimental Finance will be held Oct. 19–22 at Snead Hall, 301 W. Main St.

Catherine Eckel of Texas A&M University — a VCU alumna — and Tim Cason of Purdue University will present the keynote addresses at the Economic Science Association conference, which will be held Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 19–21. Eckel’s address is titled “Gender Differences: What Have We Learned From 25 Years of Lab Experiments?” and Cason’s is titled “Cooperation in the Inter-Group Prisoner's Dilemma.”

Keynote speakers for the North American Regional meeting of the Society for Experimental Finance on Sunday, Oct. 22, are Daniel Friedman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose discussion topic will be “High Frequency Trade: Testing Policy Options in the Lab,” and John Weinberg of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, who will address “Diagnosing Market Dysfunction.”

More than 230 behavioral scientists from academic fields including economics, finance, accounting and management will attend. The conferences will be international in scope, with some 70 presentations to be made by scholars with international academic affiliations. 

“The quality of the work presented will also be very high, with presenters from the some of the world’s most prominent institutions, including Brown, Cal Tech, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Penn, Chicago, Stanford and Vanderbilt, to name just a few,” said Douglas Davis, Ph.D., professor of economics and director of the Experimental Laboratory for Economics and Business Research, which is hosting the conferences. 

Papers will be presented on a variety of themes ranging from the effects of trading rules on market performance to issues in individual and group decision-making, including, among other topics, prosocial behaviors, gender effects, the effects of lying and morality on group behavior.

“The experimental economists here at VCU are renowned scholars with an international reputation,” said Carol Scotese, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Economics. “The group, led by Doug Davis, worked very hard to put together the winning proposal to host the conference. The strength and reputation of our experimental program along with the attractiveness of Richmond and the VCU School of Business facilities were a winning combination. I am extraordinarily proud and very fortunate to have this fine group of scholars as colleagues.”

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