overview

• Prof. Vatsalya is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Tilburg University expecting to graduate in the second half of 2018. His research interests lie in using the tools of Microeconomics, particularly Game Theory, to better understand how societies organize themselves. His ambition is to develop an economic paradigm to investigate the incentives and trade-offs that underlie the social, legal and political institutions that create and maintain what Oliver Williamson called good order and workable arrangements. His recent work is on classification institutions – such as social norms, cultural traditions, religions, laws, or regulations – that assign a normative label, acceptable or wrongful to human behaviour. As these classifications shape individual behaviour, they determine the antecedents for any kind of rule enforcement. As an off-shoot of this work, he is interested in discovering how religious and cultural myths can act as carriers of socially sanctioned heuristics for decision making.