Tugce Cuhadaroglu

As an economic theorist, Tugce is interested in developing analytical tools and models to study a wide range of social and economic phenomena. Her recent research interests can be summarised in two subtitles. Decision theory, in particular choice theory, is her first focus of interest. Tugce aims to understand how individuals make their decisions. Mainstream economic theory assumes that individuals are rational; they are self-interested, fully informed about their own preferences and able to compare all possible options in a consistent way when making a decision. However both common sense and scientific evidence confirm that this indeed is not the case. There are many other factors that shape individual decision-making that cannot be simply explained by individual rationality. Tugce aims to investigate those different mechanisms that are used by ‘boundedly rational’ individuals for decision-making. In particular, she is interested in the role of social influence on individual decisions. How do individuals influence each other’s behaviours? What are the mechanisms that we employ to influence each other? Can we disentangle the underlying influence only by looking at people’s behaviours? A second area of interest for Tugce is inequality theory. In particular, she is interested in the design of inequality measures. It is crucial to design ‘proper inequality indices’ in order to evaluate inequalities correctly. One way to achieve this is axiomatisation; starting from the properties that would be required from an inequality index and deriving the measure that satisfies those. Tugce is specifically interested in developing measures for the evaluation of non-income inequalities such as education, health and subjective well-being.

Choice theory, bounded-rationality, social influence, inequality measurement, social choice and welfare.