RISC Scholars secure funding from the Spencer Educational Foundation

A team of RISC Scholars receives a Course Development Grant from the Spencer Educational Foundation to develop a unique course on the Economics of Insurance and Decision-Making under Risk

Professor Ida Ferrara (project lead) and Professor Tsvetanka Karagyozova were awarded a Spencer Educational Foundation Course Development Grant in support of an innovative academic course on "Economics of Insurance and Decision-Making under Risk", which covers in detail behavioral and cognitive approaches to insurance decision making and is delivered with the help of Virtual Reality experiments and activities. The course will help students understand and explain observed choices that are not always consistent with the rational approach of deliberate and logical reasoning based on the probability of risk occurrence and corresponding potential loss.

Educating on the topic of risk and insurance decisions has never been more imperative, and RISC team's goal is to develop a course that considers the complexity of these decisions by augmenting the expected utility postulates, according to which people behave rationally and in a calculated manner, with behavioral insights, thus integrating theory and practice.