Keynote Session with David Hirshleifer

In this talk, David shares with us his view on an intellectual revolution, social economics and finance: the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is social transmission bias: a systematic directional shift in signals or ideas in social transactions. He uses five “fables” (models) to illustrate the novelty and scope of the transmission bias approach, and offers several emergent themes. For example, social transmission bias compounds recursively, which can help explain booms, bubbles, return anomalies, and swings in economic sentiment.

Slides: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3513201

Speaker bio:
David Hirshleifer is Merage Chair and Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Merage School of Business, University of California-Irvine. He is a Fellow and former President of the American Finance Association. He currently serves as Co-editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, and has served as Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, director of the American and Western Finance Associations, and co-editor and associate editor at leading finance, economics, and business journals. In his Presidential Address to the American Finance Association, he argues for an emerging paradigm, social economics and finance, which studies how biases in the social transmission of ideas, information and behavior affect markets and asset prices. His research interests include behavioral economics and finance, and other topics in the investments and corporate finance fields. His papers have won various research awards, including the Smith Breeden Award for outstanding paper in the Journal of Finance.