Dr. Finkelstein is Professor of Health Services and Systems Research at the Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore and the Executive Director of the Lien Centre for Palliative Care. He is also the Principal Investigator of Health Data Governance and Value Creation in the Future Health Technologies of the Singapore-ETH Centre and holds appointments at NUS School of Public Health and Duke University Global Health Institute. His research focuses on the economic causes and consequences of health behaviors, with a primary emphasis on the use of traditional and behavioral economic incentives to influence behaviors in ways to improve the public’s health. Recent research also focuses on studies to better understand the complicated decisions that revolve around end of life care. He has published nearly 300 manuscripts and 2 books in these areas, and also successfully commercialized an Obesity Cost Calculator for employers and insurers. Based on google scholar, he has an h-index of 67 and his publications have been cited over 95,000 times, including in the landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the U.S. Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). He was included in the list of the World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers in 2015, 2016 and 2017 by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics.

About the Lecture

The presentation will begin with an introduction to classical economic theory, how individuals are expected to make decisions under the classical economic model, and the role of government assuming that model is correct. The presentation will then systematically discuss select failures of rationality, including time inconstant preferences, preference instability, loss aversion, and selection biases. The presentation will then discuss how interventions can be developed to address those biases in efforts to increase effectiveness, and present several examples from Prof. Finkelstein’s studies in Singapore.

We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture. Registration is not required. Please be aware that we will be recording this guest lecture and will be making it available in our teaching library. If you have any concerns about this, please contact Olivia Keller (olkeller@ethz.ch) prior to the start of the guest lecture.