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THE CENTRE FOR BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS AND FINANCE DIRECTED BY PROFESSOR MORTEN LAU The Centre aims to improve understanding of the way that individuals and businesses make economic and financial decisions. It employs a combination of data from public and private registers, surveys and experiments to study empirical problems in economics and finance. The Centre has also developed a portable experimental laboratory to enable them to study behaviour in the field, enabling them to design solutions for complex policy issues and thereby provide insights to ongoing debates on economic, monetary and social policy in the UK. In the past, the Centre received financial support from the Carlsberg Foundation to characterise and evaluate how widespread social trust is in the adult Danish population. A simple example of deep policy significance, is the trust that individual Danes place in the government to provide pensions. Uncertainty about the size and the timing of pension payments is likely to affect the general level of support by Danes for the public provision of pensions. The Centre investigated how trust was influenced by the uncertainty and timing of the reciprocal action. Below is a fascinating insight into another recent research project that Professor Lau and his colleagues have undertaken. Individual Decision Making under Risk – Using experiments to understand investment behaviour The Centre received a research grant of £900,000 from the Danish equivalent of the ESRC to study individual risk attitudes over time, with the aim of testing if people behave consistently over time by making a long-term plan in one period and sticking to this plan in later periods.
The intention is to interview people at several points in time and elicit attitudes to risk and cost of waiting over this period so that they might better understand this complex issue. It is hoped that the findings might help to explain why people take or avoid risks in situations as diverse as gambling, choosing energy suppliers or using toll roads on their way to work. To read more about one of the Centre’s specific research projects that touches on both behavioural economics and the TV show Deal or no Deal, turn to page 8. THE CRITICAL STUDIES GROUP LED BY PROFESSOR MARK LEARMONTH This Centre was launched last September. Members share a common interest in developing research that uses a variety of critical theories to challenge conventional business thinking. Traditional accounts of business life tend to play down issues like power, control, cultural representations of business, environmentalism, identity, gender, agency and voice. These are issues which this group seeks to emphasise in order to equip students and practitioners to make better sense of the work situations in which they find themselves. Their work ranges across all management-related disciplines, including HRM, finance, accounting and marketing as well as covering public, private and voluntary sectors, and while the group is titled ‘critical’, it is a friendly forum to air ideas, bring together research conversations and connect with people across departments and disciplines. Visit the Research and Faculty pages of the DBS website for more information.
INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP DIRECTED BY DR BIRGIT SCHYNS Research undertaken by the Centre aims to go beyond traditional leadership approaches that focused on the leader as a person. While there certainly is a merit to investigating leaders themselves, these approaches to leadership ignore the critical role of the follower in the leadership processes. However, leadership has to be understood as necessarily shaped by the characteristics of followers. Followers have needs and expectations that influence both how they view and evaluate their leader but also how far they willingly follow the leader and engage with organisational goals. At the same time, followers contribute to and shape the leadership process as they respond to the leader’s perceived behaviour and shape how the leader then responds. This is where the International Centre for Leadership and Followership see its main contribution. An example of research currently being undertaken by members of the Centre is their work on ‘Implicit Leadership’ which focuses on a new drawing method to assess implicit leadership theories and how we all hold slightly different images of leaders. One of the types of leadership images they are looking at is football managers. If you would like to take part in any of their projects, visit www.durham.ac.uk/ dbs/faculty/centres/leadership