Dockner Lectures - Cars Hommes

The University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology and the Vienna University of Economics and Business have founded the "Dockner Lectures", in memory of one of the most renowned Austrian economists, Engelbert Dockner, who passed away in 2017.

In his Ph. D. thesis, Engelbert Dockner derived an elegant stability analysis of two-​state optimal control models. Another of his path-​breaking contributions is the 'blue bible' on `Differential Games in Economics and Management Science' (joint with Jorgensen, Long and Sorger). For most of his career, he was a Professor of Finance and worked on diverse topics such as asset pricing, risk dynamics, and financial market structures.

The Dockner Lectures started in 2019 with Prof. Ngo Van Long (McGill University) at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2020 and 2021, the planned event at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Therefore, we are pleased to announce this year's Dockner Lecture by Cars Hommes, who is Professor of Economic Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam.

Photo Gallery: Dockner Lecture 2022 by Cars Hommes

Event:Dockner Lectures:
Cars Hommes - "Complex Economic Dynamics"
Date:10 May, 2022 - 5:00 p.m.
Place:Skylounge (12th Floor), Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna
Abstract:This talk surveys some of my work on complex economic dynamics with adaptively learning agents in behavioral macro-finance models and laboratory experiments with human subjects.  The economy consists of boundedly rational agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision heuristics.This leads to a complex nonlinear adaptive system with complex dynamics, where the economy may not settle down to the rational equilibrium, but rather agents may learn almost self-fulfilling equilibria with highly persistent expectations driven fluctuations.