The doctoral programme in Economics and Management was founded in 2004 with the aim of providing state of the art research training in the fields of decision sciences, organization and human and natural resource management. Ever since its foundation the programme has placed a special emphasis on the methodologies used by behavioural approaches to economics. Behavioural approaches seek to understand the determinants of economic decision making in real world settings. Going beyond the standard rationality postulate to focus on the actual behaviour of individuals, such approaches have increasingly proven usefully in order to generate predictions about market dynamics, particularly in the fields of finance, natural resources, tourism, and consumption. They have equally shown their validity in helping to design organisations and institutions.
The programme offers two specialisations:
Behavioural Economics
Behavioural Economics focuses on foundations of decision making and bounded rationality, and develops behavioural approaches to economic analysis of individuals, markets and institutions, mostly based on experimental methods, computable economics, agent-based models and techniques.
Management
The Management specialisation focuses on organization theory and organisational and social decision making, innovation management, social network analysis; methods include simulations for managerial decision making and management practices and firm performance.