Bert W. Wasserman Workshop in Law and Finance: "Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance" with Prof. David Hirshleifer of the USC Marshall School of Business

David Hirshleifer, Professor of Finance and Business Economics, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, will be presenting his Presidential Address from the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association. The abstract for the address states:

I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance—the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is social transmission bias: systematic directional shift in signals or ideas induced by social transactions. I use five “fables” (models) to illustrate the novelty and scope of the transmission bias approach, and offer several emergent themes. For example, social transmission bias compounds recursively, which can help explain booms, bubbles, return anomalies, and swings in economic sentiment.

The complete address is available at this link.