On Friday 3 February 2017 Yu Gao will defend her PhD thesis entitled 'Stability and Adaptivity: Preferences over Time and under Risk'. Supervisors are Professors Han Bleichrodt and Kirsten Rohde (both from Erasmus School of Economics). Other members of the committee are Professors Aurelien Baillon (Erasmus School of Economics), Olivier l'Haridon (University of Rennes) and Dr. Gijs van de Kuilen (Tilburg University).
Time and location
The PhD defence will take place in the Senate Hall of Erasmus University Rotterdam and will start at 09.30 hrs.
About 'Stability and Adaptivity: Preferences Over Time and Under Risk'
This dissertations investigated the stability, and adaptivity of decision making over time and under risk. Chapter 2 introduced a new method to measure the temporal discounting of money. Chapter 3 tested reduction invariance, and confirmed the validity of Prelec's compound-invariant proability weighting function. Chapter 4 compared the deviations from constant discounting for health and money. Chapter 5 elicited people's risk attitudes when using cash vs. numbers. Chapter 6 discussed if people have completely different risk preferences when making decisions from experience, and provided new evidence to the DFD-DFE gap literature.
About Yu Gao
Yu Gao (1986) obtained BSc degree in 2009 on Financial engineering at Shandong University, and MPhil degree on Economics in 2011 at Tinbergen Institute and University of Amsterdam. In 2011, she joined the behavioral Economics group at Erasmus School of Economics (Erasmus University Rotterdam) as a PhD candidate. Financial support from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and Tinbergen Institute are gratefully acknowledged. This thesis reflects what she worked on during these four years to understand human decision making over time and under risk. She is interested in solving problems in the real world and applying her knowledges to public policy. Since September 2015, she joined the research group of "Behavioral Solutions for Climate and the Environment", and became a research fellow at Polytechnic University of Milan.