News

Jakub Steiner Receives Prestigious ERC Grant

29 November, 2017

We are proud to announce that a highly prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant has been awarded to Jakub Steiner, CERGE-EI researcher and senior faculty member, for his research proposal entitled Behavioral Implications of Information-Processing Frictions.

Jakub Steiner is the first researcher in the Czech Republic to be awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant in the field of social sciences and humanities. Upon being informed about receiving the grant, Jakub Steiner stated: “I feel a mixture of joy from the recognition of my research program combined with the stress from the obligation to deliver the results.

In the proposed research, Jakub aims to shed light on the underlying drivers of behavioral biases, such as overconfidence or perception bias, that are described by behavioral economics and psychology. In his novel micro-based models, he will analyze the effect of information processing costs on the choices of otherwise rational agents to infer the extent of bias they cause. His work will thus not only build the theoretical grounds for this area of behavioral economics, but also inform the policy debate on the need for “debiasing” interventions.

"This is a great achievement for Jakub Steiner, and acknowledgement of the research potential for the behavioral implications of information-processing frictions. As the ERC is one of the most prestigious funding agencies for research in the world, this grant is confirmation of CERGE-EI's mission to focus on rigorous top quality research and economic education, and is encouragement to the many young and talented scholars exploring economic and social sciences," says the Director of CERGE-EI, Michal Kejak.

Jakub’s grant is the second ERC grant for CERGE-EI.

In 2015, an ERC Starting Grant was awarded to CERGE-EI researcher Filip Matějka for his work on Rational Inattention. CERGE-EI is also the only academic workplace in the Czech Republic where scholars have been awarded ERC grants in the field of economics.

The European Research Council (ERC), set up by the European Union in 2007, is the main European funding organization for frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best creative researchers of any nationality and age to conduct research projects based in Europe. ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they may still be consolidating their own independent research team or program.