Eckel named among top 25 behavioral economists
Department of Economics' Catherine C. Eckel was recognized among the top 25 behavioral economists by website, The Best Schools.
In one sense, applying insights about human nature and action to the explanation of economic behavior is as old as the discipline of economics itself. In fact, you might say that Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” just is the recognition of how the self-interested actions of individuals play out at the scale of local and national collective behavior.[1] In other words, all economics is squarely founded on psychology in a general sense.
In another, narrower sense, though, the marriage of economic theory with more sophisticated insights into human behavior gleaned from the increasingly empirical orientation of psychologists over the past few decades is a much more recent phenomenon. It is this intersection of classical economic theory and recent personality and social psychology that we have in mind when we speak of “behavioral economics.”
The sub-discipline that calls itself by that name is less than 50 years old, having grown largely out of work done by Daniel Kahneman (see below) and the late Amos Tversky, beginning in the late 1960s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later at Stanford University. To be sure, their work on heuristics and decision-making under uncertainty, which would eventually grow into what we now call “behavioral economics,” did have some precedents — especially in the writings of Herbert A. Simon and others on real-world human cognitive limitations due (as they saw it) to finite neural computational resources (“bounded rationality”). Nevertheless, Kahneman and Tversky’s explicit challenge to the reigning paradigm of “rational choice theory” in economics[2] (later elaborated by them and renamed “prospect theory”[3]) was startling, not to say revolutionary. The theoretical rigor and empirical support of their work was so great, however, that it quickly won recognition, founding an entirely new academic field, and with it, a new way of thinking about economic behavior and human behavior generally.
For this list, we have enforced only one requirement: to make the list, the individual in question must be housed in either an economics or a psychology department, and must be publicly identified as a behavioral economist (among other things).
Beyond that, we have simply tried to assemble as influential and vigorously active a group of 25 people as possible to represent this important, if upstart, academic field.
Catherine C. Eckel
Eckel (née Coleman) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1953. She holds a PhD (1983) in economics from the University of Virginia. She has taught at the University of British Columbia, Virginia Tech, and the University of Texas at Dallas, where she was Founder and Director of the Center for Behavioral and Experimental Economic Science. Eckel is currently Sarah and John Lindsey Professor in the Liberal Arts and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Behavioral Economics and Policy Program.
Eckel calls herself an experimental behavioral economist, meaning that her research consists largely of empirical field work, with a focus on the effects of various psychological factors upon ordinary economic calculations. She has made important contributions both to topics of mainly theoretical interest and to others highly relevant to the formulation of policy. The main psychological topics she has studied, often from a modified game-theoretic perspective, include cooperation, risk tolerance, trust, social status, and gender. Over the years, she has won a large number of research grants. More specifically, she has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on more than 40 projects funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as other agencies and foundations.
Eckel is author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dictionary entries, book reviews, and other publications (see the list below for some of the most important of these). In addition to her research, she has been unusually dedicated to undergraduate and graduate teaching, as evidenced, among other things, by her winning in 2012 the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award bestowed by the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In naming Eckel as a recipient of this prestigious award, the Committee cited her work in both developing and participating in mentoring programs for women assistant professors. Eckel has sat on the board of numerous academic and governmental boards and professional associations; she has also been a member of the editorial committee of several journals in her field, including a stint from 2005 until 2012 as Co-Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
For full list, click here.