When: Thursday, June 10, 2021 - Friday, June 11, 2021, 8:50 AM - 4:30 PMWhere: Online, Zoom
The Behavioural Finance Working Group (BFWG) is hosting their first virtual conference on 10 - 11 June 2021, focusing on the theme of behavioural finance and ethics.
The Behavioural Finance Working Group (BFWG) conference is a two-day meeting, jointly organized by the BFWG and Queen Mary University of London, UK. It examines a wide range of behavioural finance topics, ranging between financial decision making and biases, herding, corporate finance, fund management, asset pricing, financial forecasting, volatility, and market sentiment.
Keynote by Max H. Bazerman, Straus Professor - Harvard Business School- Nudging Ethical Behavior in Financial Contexts (and Beyond)
Abstract
We want to have a positive impact on the world, but we’re constrained by limited time and resources, financial self-interest, our obligations to our work and families, and many other barriers. Better, Not Perfect focuses on how to be a better person despite these barriers. Offering insights from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and behavioral economics, Better, Not Perfect will provide insight into how to do more good, consistent with, but not limited to, the philosophy of utilitarianism, given our cognitive limitations and self-interested motives.
Ethical challenges are not new, but new and different ones are arising every day. Bernard Madoff’s theft of billions of dollars reminds us that people may be more exposed to crooks—and perhaps more willfully ignorant of their crimes. In many countries across the world, finding collective value has disappeared as a national goal. We urgently need to find and follow a North Star that creates more ethical behavior, more value, and supports all of us in our simple quest to do better.
Bio
Max H. Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Max is the author or co-author of twelve books (including Better, Not, Perfect, The Power of Experiments [with Mile Luca], 2020, The Power of Noticing, the eighth edition of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making [with Don A. Moore], 2013, Blind Spots [with Ann Tenbrunsel], 2011, and the forthcoming Decision Leadership (with Don A. Moore), and over 200 research articles and chapters.
His former doctoral students have accepted positions at leading business schools throughout the United States, including the Kellogg School at Northwestern, UCL, LBS, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the Fuqua School at Duke, the Johnson School at Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, Columbia, and the Harvard Business School.
His awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), the Life Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute, being named as Ethisphere's 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, a Daily Kos Hero from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, and the Distinguished Scholar Award, the Distinguished Educator Award, and the Organizational Behavior Division’s Life Achievement Award from the Academy of Management. Max's consulting, teaching, and lecturing includes work in 30 countries.
Keynote by Professor Boudewijn de Bruin, University of Groningen- Moral and epistemic virtues in finance: Insights from ethics and behavioral economics
Most people tend to see ethics in finance as a tool to counteract the 'greed is good' culture that allegedly pervades the financial world, and ethics instruments as a means to stimulate 'moral virtue'. In this talk, I consider a different type of virtue: epistemic or informational virtue, which guides the way we recruit, process, and use information. I discuss a number of cases in the history of finance determined by a lack of epistemic virtue. I look at ways to increase epistemic virtue at individual and corporate levels. And I report recent research on a psychological scale to measure epistemic virtue and its contrary, epistemic vice.
Boudewijn de Bruin is professor of financial ethics in the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and obtained a PhD from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in 2004. He is the author of Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is worse than Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and has worked on such topics as ethics management in banking, sustainable finance, and financial regulation. He has held visiting positions at Harvard Business School and Cambridge University, among others. De Bruin is life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.