TILEC Seminar

First, a lesson: "sign in" in Dutch is "aanmelden." Or at least that's what comes up on Google blogger when I open it up from Tilburg.

Had an excellent afternoon and evening yesterday hosted by the Tilburg Law and Economics Center. The Center puts on a monthly seminar series with invited speakers, always on competition/trade/economic regulation topics (shouldn't we all be so lucky!). I shared the bill with Dr. Mark Armstrong (UCL), whose work on consumer economics is quite excellent. He's one of very few writing on these topics who relies on the work of Robert Cialdini, whose contributions to the management school literature on consumer contracting are very illuminating. Dr. Armstrong noted at the outset of his talk that too few economists look to the business school literature to inform their theories.

What I liked most about his paper, "Exploding Offers and Buy-Now Discounts," is that it provides a rational choice model to explain a behavioralist critique of a previously short-sighted rational choice theory. Is this the next step in antitrust economics? We all know the rational choice hypothesis has been proved wrong, time and again. Will we now see repeated papers tweaking the general theory to accommodate the behavioralist critique? That seems to me to be undeniably a good thing.

Finally, an excellent dinner at a restaurant called Meesters in the center of Tilburg with my host Angelos Dimopoulos.