DFG-NSF Research Conference: Contextualizing Economic Behavior

Thu-Sat Aug 21-23, 2008, New York City


Economic behavior has long been seen as a topic of keen interest to the social and behavioral sciences and to various areas of practice. In recent years, the globalization of economic models and the growing interdependence of economies and markets widely diagnosed by economists have added to this interest. The parameters of the analysis of economic behavior have also shifted in the last decades, with the scope of the changes ranging from the macro to the micro level.

Compared with the earlier focus on the productive sector of the economy, it is now a credit economy and financialization that need consideration. Other macro level changes comprise a shift to a knowledge- and information-driven economy, with consequences for the distribution of opportunities and wealth, the design and management of firms, and regional advantages resulting from the concentration of innovation.

On a micro-level, attention has shifted to formerly neglected variables such as the constitution of preferences, emotions, non-cognitive skills, discursive framing in decision making, market microstructures and human interaction in general.

Somewhere in between lies a renewed focus on bringing institutions back in — manifest in the rise of the new institutional economics and the new institutional sociology concerned with the economic rationality of organizations. Many of these developments point to the need to broaden the range of concepts and variables taken into consideration when economic behavior is studied. They point to the need to contextualize economic action and to rethink economic behavior itself, by broadening our understanding of its internal processes and engagements and its biological foundations.

The objective of this workshop is to explore the advances in several research communities with regard to such questions, and to bring these communities together across disciplinary boundaries.

In the past, economists tended to abstract away from the context in which actors make decisions, focusing instead on the individuals' goals and preferences and their constraints. Yet developments such as behavioral economics and finance, socio-economics and social economics, and recent survey research that looks at the determinants of crime, educational performance, utility ("happiness") and rewards have led to a revision of the assumptions underlying abstract models.

Sociologists tended to focus on behavioral rationality and the social and political fields in which economies are embedded. Yet the new economic sociology and the new sociology of finance seek something else: focused theoretical frameworks and empirical data that explain how economic variables are shaped concretely by social relationships, how market microstructures and pricing routines develop in areas that range from finance to art, or how economic action is represented and imagined by social groups, reinforcing or preventing the emergence of specific economic cultures.

Psychologically oriented researchers have broadened their focus not only by addressing economic decision making under different contextual conditions, but also by bringing on board emotional, psychodynamic and neuroscientific concepts and instruments that result in more complex models of this behavior. While members of these research communities may not agree on single variables and analytical methods, their overlapping contextual concerns and fresh methodological approaches to the concrete processes and engagements of economic behavior call for a conference that focuses on these concerns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opening Speaker


Scientific Committee


Links to DFG and NSF International Programs


NSF Programs: