Title:
Pursuing common goods
Date:
October 14, 2024
Time:
15:00 - 18:00
Venue:
InterContinental (Trilliant)
ABOUT
Jean Tirole was born in Troyes, France. After having studied engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses in Paris, he turned his interests to economics and mathematics. In 1981 he received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US. He maintained his connections to MIT, as a professor of economics from 1984 to 1991 and thereafter a few weeks per year. Since 1992 he has worked at the Toulouse School of Economics, in Toulouse, France.
If markets dominated by a small number of companies are left unregulated, society often suffers negative consequences. Prices can become unjustifiably high and new companies can be prevented from entering the market. Since the mid-1980s, Jean Tirole has worked to develop a coherent theory of how regulation and antitrust should be adapted to suit conditions specific to each industry. Tirole has applied this framework to several industries, from banking to telecommunications and payment and digital platforms. He has also published extensively on game theory, the economics of organizations, macroeconomics, and psychology and economics, and is the author a the wide-audience book Economics for the common good.
ABOUT
THE LECTURE
The goal of economics and other social sciences is to contribute to making the world a better place. The lecture will first ponder over what a "better world" means and will discuss whether and how public action can achieve the common good through persuasion, the change of norms and the provision of incentives. The market economy has become the dominant mode of social organization in almost all countries, yet it has won neither hearts nor minds, a puzzle the lecture will address. We will then argue that while markets often fail, public policy also often does, for predictable reasons. This twin failure stems from the divergence between individual and general interests. It raises the question of how to organize public policy and to design a modern state. Finally, public policy also faces our many cognitive biases. The lecture will emphasize motivated beliefs and its consequences for the prevalence of narratives over science-based policy, leading to the challenge of how to win the narratives contest.