The Philip Babcock Memorial Undergraduate Lecture was established at the University of California, Santa Barbara to honor the vibrant legacy of UCSB Professor Philip Babcock. The lecture seeks to expose our students and the community at large to the most intriguing applications of economics. Our speaker has been chosen to convey some of the joy Professor Babcock found in applying economics to the world.

As such, for our inaugural lecture Professor Colin Camerer of Caltech will present on the economics of strategic thinking. His work seeks a better understanding of the psychological and neurobiological basis of decision-making in order to validate different economic models of human economic behavior. His research uses mostly economics experiments to understand how people behave when making decisions (e.g., risky gambles for money), in games, and in markets (e.g., speculative price bubbles).

Professor Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his MBA from the University of Chicago at 19 years old and his PhD in behavioral decision theory, also from the University of Chicago, just three years later.