Dr Edward Cartwright

Profile

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Senior Lecturer in Economics

Office: B1.06 Keynes
Telephone: +44 1227 823460
Email: Edward Cartwright

Edward Cartwright is Senior Lecturer in Economics. He was born in Wolverhampton in 1977 and graduated from the University of Durham in 1999. He completed both his MSc and PhD at the University of Warwick. He subsequently spent a year as a post-doctoral student at EUREQua, Universite Paris 1 (Pantheon - Sorbonne) before joining the University of Kent in 2004.

Edward’s main research interests are game theory, behavioral economics and public economics. His curent research interests include the consequences and origins of conformity and prejudice, the emergence of leadership and its role in resolving coordination problems, and large games.

Research

Research interests

Much of Edward’s current research focuses on aspects of leadership, social learning and social influence. Specifically, it looks to model situations where economic agents are making decisions sequentially or repeatedly and can observe what other agents have done in the past. How are/should agents be influenced by what they observe others doing? and how should an agent behave if he expects others to be influenced by what he is doing?

Specific issues that are the subject of ongoing research include:

  • Who chooses to lead, and follow, and why?
  • Does leadership help to resolve coordination problems?
  • The optimal theory of search when agents can learn from the search of others.
  • Under what conditions imitation and conformity are consistent with individual rationality.
  • How beliefs, and beliefs about beliefs, influence the emergence of conventions and social norms.

Two ESRC Research Grants, ‘Why some people choose to be leaders: the emergence of leadership in groups and organizations’ (joint with Mark van Vugt) and ‘Social Learning and the Theory of Search’, as well as a British Academy Grant, 'Free-riding in public good games' (joint with Mark van Vugt)' have supported this research.

You can hear a podcast interview with Jeremy Pritchard about research on evolution and leadership at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v_EHTdZugY [9]

Edward is also a member of the University of Kent’s Centre for Reasoning and The Centre for the Study of Group Processes

Edward's RePEc page is http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pca11.htm

Current work

Working Papers

Publications

Articles
Contributions to Books
  • 'The Law of Demand in Tiebout Economies', (2006) with J. Conley and M. Wooders, in The Tiebout Model at 50: Essays in Public Economics in honour of Wallace Oates, W. A. Fischel (Ed).

PhD supervision

Current Students
  • Mr Amrish Patel

Administrative roles