Stephanie Wang

The intersection of morality and markets that often shapes our economic landscape will be Stephanie Wang’s focus this year. Specifically, she plans to explore ethical judgments about markets for existing and emerging performance enhancing technologies and the regulatory implications using data from structured discussions and experiments. What narratives and norms do people use to make sense of the moral implications of new technologies? Do they rely on parallels to historical precedents and what prognostications about the future are they more likely to trust? How malleable are these judgments in response to new information that may affect the tradeoffs between old and new technologies for example? What types of principles, causal relationships, and anecdotes are used to change others' minds and which arguments are successful in shifting opinions? A better understanding of how the boundary between permissibility and repugnance is drawn and redrawn can inform pressing policy debates.  

Wang is professor of economics at University of Pittsburgh. Most of her research involves studying decision-making and strategic interactions through a behavioral economics lens with experimental methods. Her work on topics ranging from optimal adaptive methods for eliciting economic preferences to the strategic importance of higher-order beliefs to choices and cognition under scarcity has appeared in American Economic Review, Econometrica, NHB, PNAS, and Review of Economic Studies among others. She has served as an associate editor at European Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, and Management Science.

For more information, please visit: http://www.pitt.edu/~swwang