Moumita Deb

Moumita DebDoctoral researcher
Department of Economics

Supervisors:

Professor Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Dr Johannes Lohse, Dr Rebecca McDonald

Essays in information acquisition and consequent decision-making.

My research uses tools provided by behavioural economics to study questions related to information acquisition by individuals and how this impacts their voting behaviour or other decisions. In particular, I am interested in information consumption choices of committee-members in environments where how much they know about the information of others, is varied. This has consequences for the success or failure of committees to coordinate on superior outcomes rather than on inferior ones. I am also interested in individuals’ willingness to acquire information and act to coordinate with others in order to avoid the catastrophic effects of adverse climate change. Another area that attracts me is individuals’ affinity to consume social media news as compared to traditional media news, and the trade-offs involved in this decision. A common theme that runs through my current and future research topics is about exploring the conditions under which individuals decide to free-ride informationally or otherwise, on others. More generally, I build models, derive theoretical predictions, and conduct lab/online experiments to test them, all in the pursuit of advancing our understanding of how individuals choose to inform themselves in strategic/collective settings.

Qualifications

  • BA (Honours) Economics - Hansraj College, University of Delhi
  • MS Economics – Shiv Nadar University

Biography

Moumita is a final year PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. She is a holder of a generous PhD scholarship here and has received various awards during the course of her doctoral studies such as being the ‘Images of Research’ graduate competition winner from College of Social Sciences, and winning the Postgraduate Research student led activity grants awarded by the University of Birmingham Graduate School. She has been a Teaching Assistant for modules of Microeconomics-postgraduate and Game Theory-undergraduate. She has also acted as a Supervising Tutor under the ‘Access to Birmingham’ widening participation programme. She has served as a Postgraduate Research Student Representative at University of Birmingham. She has presented her research in several international conferences like ESA 2022 (Bologna), ASFEE 2022 (Lyon) and SPUDM 2021 (online). Currently, she is working part-time as the Research Coordinator at Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing, along-with writing up her thesis. Overall, she views herself as a researcher who is inspired by topical issues and enjoys learning insights from other disciplines. She is keenly looking forward to meaningfully utilising her training and skills in an academic position post her PhD.

Research interests

  • Behavioural/Experimental Economics
  • Information Economics
  • Applied Game Theory
  • Political Economy

Teaching responsibilities

Microeconomics: Postgraduate (Face-to-face as well as online), Teaching Assistant (Autumn 2019-2021)

Professional memberships

  • Economic Science Association (2021-present)
  • European Economic Association (2022-present)
  • Strategic Information Network (2020-present)

Contact details

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