zurich_econ

If you're really interested in applying behavioral decision theory to finance, then "either..or" won't suffice, you'll have to know both, behavioral and finance! But I don't really know behavioral finance well enough to know how well you have to know asset pricing to do behavioral finance - the papers that I have read (as well as Andrei Shleifer's book about it) did not use more than the very rudiments of asset pricing, and usually even less than that. But that may just be a selection...

The research in (behavioral) decision theory is similar for business schools and econ departments. Experiments are a big part, another big part is axiomatic preference theory, which is extremely mathematical (e.g. you're better interested in topology if you want to go into this strand of research). If you look at the prospect theory paper, you'll see that also prospect theory is axiomatized (in the appendix), but in general there is not so much interaction between the two strands. If you want to get an overview of what is currently being done in this literature, here some recommendations: A recent paper that is close in spirit to the prospect theory paper in the sense that it's theory but not axiomatized is by Bordalo, Gennaioli and Shleifer, called 'salience theory'. Koszegi and Rabin have extended the prospect theory model to endogenize the reference point, see their paper "a model of reference dependent preferences". Nick Barberis is famous for applying prospect theory in finance. Berkeley (and maybe Harvard) are probably the best places if you're interested in this kind of research.

Just to add to the ethics discussion: If you take a course on market design, you'll see that early offers and similar kinds of behavior leads to unraveling such that ever more offers are being made ever earlier, and participants of unraveled markets usually hate that their market is in such a state (talk to a law student, it's pretty bad there). Anyone who prevents early offers from being profitable for the universities, e.g. by accepting but reneging if a better offer comes along, provides a public good - and punishes a defector. In this case, the selfish action benefits the greater good more than the seemingly 'ethical' action, which doesn't take into account the externalities that it creates.

Isn't there this paragraph in the statutes of the council of graduate schools that says that if you accept an offer under such conditions you are not obliged to follow suit - precisely to prevent schools from engaging in this kind of behavior? I'd try to find the paragraph, then accept the offer, and if a better one comes along, just not follow suit.

To apply for this program (I was admitted), I had googled for a research proposal in economics that had won an NSF (unfortunately, I don't find it anymore) and copied its structure. What was salient about it: 1. Brevity (and, as a byproduct, clarity) is king - it was barely 2 pages long; 2. The first section/page was the general idea and some interesting implications the research would have, and the second section/page was a slightly more detailed account of how the author tried to obtain his conjectured results; 3. There was no mathematics and no formalism involved. Once you get an idea about how busy professors are reading such things, you'll really appreciate point 1 - it's your (only) chance to get it read! oh, and a happy new year!

I disagree with the comments above. Reading the economist and similar publications may be very helpful in giving you research ideas later on. True, they don't help with the first year, but the first year is no more than a hurdle you need to clear. Coming up with good research ideas is the meat of what you will be doing as a PhD-student. Btw. Monika Piazzesi and various other professors at Stanford actually often encourage us to read the economist, and to look for research ideas in the real world!

I don't think this is good advice. Here in Stanford the main message we get about social choice theory is that it's dead. Unless you can advance the literature to a similar extent that Arrow did, I don't think anyone is going to be very interested in your results. The political economy literature has progressed, and answers questions that are related to what social choice theory tried to do, but in a less normative framework, with much more game theory, and it actually succeeds in producing results other than impossibility theorems.

I'm not at all an econometrician, but just to give you a starting point for the search, I'd check out conditional/multinomial logit/probit models.

When I applied I very clearly stated my interests in behavioral economics in my SOP, and two of my four recs were from behavioral economists (and those professors are not known for anything else than behavioral economics). Also, in my SOPs, for each university, I stated the profs in behavioral econ at that particular university that I would have liked to work with. To hedge my bets, I also included a paragraph about two other fields I find quite interesting, but the focus was very clearly on behavioral econ. It didn't hurt me.

I used to think that the GRE quant should be weighted much less, since it measures so many other things than quant ability. But actually, these other things that the test also measures, like how well you think under pressure, how fast you think, how easily you get nervous, how well you do things the first time you do them (relating to the fact that you can't click 'back' in the test), how many petty mistakes you make, are actually very very important in academia, maybe even more so than what the GRE Q actually claims to measure. But, if getting 790/800 really is hard to get for someone because of the quant abilities it requires, then this person will likely have a hard time in grad school too. So I think discussing what possibilities there are for people with a low quant score is kind of mislead - the only right thing to do, in my opinion, is to simply practice again, to get your act together (also psychologically) and get those 800 points.

I had a somewhat similar problem in that I had no idea how my undergrad institution would be regarded (international), and what would be in my letters of recommendation. But I think that given your profile, if your profs write glowing letters for you, I think you might have good chances even at top places. And because the contents of your letters will probably remain unknown to you I think the shortcoming in your strategy is that there are no top places on your list, while you actually might have a decent chance there.

@Behavioral: If you think demanding that someone learn microtheory before doing behavioral economics is not an extremely good idea, then you clearly have a very different understanding about what behavioral economics is than most behavioral economists at economics departments. This is not a critique, but just saying that we might be talking about quite different things.

I agree with KKecon. Moreover, it seems like the Tilburg program is really a psychology program, whereas the nottingham program is clearly an economics program. I guess which of those you attend will have quite significant implications as to which kind of PhD programs you have a chance at, the former preparing you much better for the psychology/marketing/organizational behavior programs at business schools, probably making it hard to get into econ programs, while the latter gives you a better chance at the econ programs and a lesser chance at those other programs. From what I infer about you interests, the psychology/marketing/organizational behavior programs would correspond much better to your interests than an econ PhD (I'm quite a bit into behavioral economics as well, but definitely on the econ/theory side of it. Models play a very important role also in the experiments that behavioral economists do, basically they are all geared towards providing evidence for or against particular models. Moreover, a behavioral economist here at Stanford told me that nowadays it is extremely hard to publish experimental results in econ journals unless they are closely tied to theory) To see which side you like better, I recommend having a look at some papers by the Kahnemann/Tversky/Simonson/Heath/etc crowd (corresponding to the psychology side) and at some by e.g. Bernheim, Koszegi, Rabin, Kariv, etc (corresponding to the economics side). And be aware that just because the former are much more easy to read, they are not necessarily more interesting, but also that just because the latter are harder to read they are not necessarily more insightful.

In Zurich the MA is in English (but I would not necessarily recommend going there for a masters, some classes are huge and not always of superior quality - unless you're extremely interested in neuroeconomics or experimental economics, that is). I'm pretty sure that the more prestigious programs in the french part of Switzerland (e.g. Geneva and Lausanne) are also in English - I don't know anything about the quality of those masters programs, however.

I heard that unlike other universities they'll reimburse you for the costs of the flyout only if you actually enroll there, for obvious reasons.