Roland J. M. Bénabou

http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers.html

Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor
of Economics and Public Affairs,
Princeton University

 ◾"The Economics of Motivated Beliefs," Jean-Jacques Laffont Lecture (2014), forthcoming in the Revue d'Economie Politique.

I present the key ideas and results from recent work incorporating “motivated” belief distortions into Economics, both at the individual level (overconfidence, wishful thinking, willful blindness) and at the social one (groupthink, team morale, market exuberance and crises). To do so I develop a flexible model that unifies much of this line of research, then relate its main assumptions and testable predictions to the relevant experimental and observational evidence.