Dr. Subrato Banerjee is a behavioural economist teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology Department of Economics (Bombay) with interests in game theory and behavioural economics. His seminar was hosted by HSE campus on Pokrovsky Boulevard and was followed by a meeting with Maxim Nikitin, ICEF Master’s Programme Academic Supervisor, where the two sides discussed the possibility of starting a double-degree master’s programme. In the evening, ICEF welcomed Dr. Banerjee for a meeting with its faculty.
At the seminar, Professor Banerjee presented his paper “Fairness is Flexible: A study of competing focal points” (co-authored by Priyanka Kothari and Prabal Roy Chowdhury). In this study, the authors use a unique set of data to model the predictability of a mutually beneficial outcome in unstructured (dialogue-based) bargaining in the context of the focal points, each of which represents a factor leading to a particular result. While the cooperative bargaining literature allows for various notions of fairness, there is no consensus as to which notion of fairness prevails in a given bargaining environment. The study looks at three broad classes of fairness concepts and provides useful insights about which fairness notion to expect in a given scenario. Based on a unique dataset gained experimentally and involving dialogue-based bargaining, the authors show that the size of the divisible pie itself provides strong hints about which fairness solution to expect.
Dr. Subrato Banerjee holds a PhD in Quantitative Economics and has been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology Department of Economics since 2020. He is a research fellow at the Center for Behavioral Economics, Society and Technology in Brisbane (BEST/Australia) and has published multiple research papers on the issues of health care, bargaining results predictability, and access to technologies as a factor influencing corporate performance. Surbato is also a columnist with multiple media outlets, covering a diversity of topics, the latest ones including Stephen Hawking, westernization in higher education, and irrationality in times of COVID-19.
