Presentation
- Department of Political Economy
- King's College London
- Bush House NE Wing
- London WC2R 2LS, UK
-
- #C#Sanchez.Pages#NOSPAM#gmail#P#com
Main Sections
Interests
My research lies at the intersection of political economy, behavioural economics and experimental methods. I study how individuals and groups make strategic decisions.
A central theme of my work is conflict, including political violence, inequality and bargaining. Much of my research combines theory with laboratory and data evidence (see my research page).
I work across disciplines and draw on ideas from political science, psychology and biology. This has led me to study cooperation, deception, social identity and gender differences in behaviour.
I also engage in public outreach. I am one of the editors of the Spanish economics policy blog Nada es Gratis, I have appeared in media and share lectures and talks on my YouTube channel.
More recently, I have developed work on the relationship between economics and culture. I have written about Economics and Cinema and I am currently preparing a book on Economics and Science Fiction.
Economics of Conflict
Economic tradition has mainly considered that markets and voting are the only allocation mechanisms.
Casual observation shows that many times individuals and groups not only produce, trade or vote but also influence, appropriate or attack others in order to attain their goals: Self interested agents do choose to what extent they engage in economic and non-economic (conflict) activities.
These ideas ar not new. Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, von Clausewitz, Tolstoi or Marx tried to understand the conflictive aspect of human interactions and pointed out that any peaceful agreement must take it into account.
All this creates an important implication for Economics: In order to be stable, any agreement or allocation generated through markets or voting procedures must give to each agent at least what she could get in case of conflict. Therefore, it is evident that Economics, understood as the study of the allocation of scarce resources, must be concerned about these issues. In fact, in the last years, there has been a growing interest about them. The tools of economic analysis, like Game Theory, have been applied to the exploration of the consequences of incorporating conflict into mainstream Economics.