We just heard this morning that Professor Brendan Walsh, formerly of UCD School of Economics and the ESRI, passed away suddenly.
Brendan was a hugely important and influential figure in the Irish economics community and a terrific colleague to boot.
People better qualified than me will no doubt write an appreciation, but in the meantime, deepest sympathies are extended to his family.
Update: appreciations from the Irish Times, Irish Independent.
The ESRI published a report on Friday entitled “An Investigation of Consumers’ Capabilities with Complex Products“. The authors are Pete Lunn, Marek Bohacek, Jason Somerville, Aine Ni Choisdealbha and Féidhlim McGowan. It contains a fascinating range of experimental findings demonstrating the pronounced difficulties experienced by consumers in valuing and making decisions with complex, multi-attribute products.
Below is from the ESRI press release. This has been a long-run research programme and the work is worth wide-spread debate in terms of implications for consumer protection, regulation and related policy areas.
PRICE Lab is a research programme in behavioural economics, jointly funded by the Central Bank of Ireland, the Commission for Communications Regulation, the Commission for Energy Regulation and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. The lab uses computerised experiments to study what consumers are capable of and what they are not.
The experiments described in the report systematically tested how accurately consumers could distinguish good deals from bad deals. The results showed that once consumers had to take into account more than two or three factors at the same time, they struggled to spot good deals and often made mistakes.
The findings also revealed systematic biases in consumers’ choices. Across multiple experiments, consumers tended to think that deals closer to the top of the product range were good value while deals closer to the bottom were bad, even when the high-end products were expensive for what they were and the low-end products were good value at the price listed.
The report discusses implications of the results for consumer protection. The findings suggest that consumers can benefit if product ranges and descriptions are kept simple. Where companies instead market products in an unnecessarily complex fashion, with multiple characteristics and price components, consumers will be more likely to make mistakes. In markets where consumers struggle with the volume or complexity of product information, comprehensive, independent price comparison sites can play an important role, by helping consumers to integrate the information or by drawing consumers’ attention to the most important product features.
I’m very excited to announce this blog’s new contributors, who you’ll be hearing a lot more from soon:
The Department of Economics at Trinity College Dublin invites applications for a Grattan Scholarship at PhD level, starting in September 2016, on the economics of city regrowth. The funding includes all fees, an annual stipend of €20,000 and a budget for research expenses, over a four-year period. In return, Scholars are expected to undertaking teaching and research assistance as required. Interested applicants are requested to contact Ronan Lyons (ronan.lyons@tcd.ie) by Monday May 16th.
More information is available at this link: The Economics of City Regrowth – Grattan Scholarship 2016-2020
The Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland is entering its 170th year – which surely means it must rank among the oldest societies of its kind on the planet. As it enters a new year, I would just like to draw the attention of this blog’s readers to the following two notices: