Leicester economist in discussion with Nobel Prize winner
A Nobel Prize winner and University of Leicester Professor have been featured in a new report on rationality and decision making.
Professor Eyal Winter (pictured) who is Professor of Economics in the School of Business has been interviewed by McKinsey & Company quarterly with Nobel Prize winner Laureate Eric Maskin on the subject of Leadership and behaviour: Mastering the mechanics of reason and emotion.
The experts offer common sense and counter-intuitive insights on performance, collaboration, and innovation.
The report states: “The confluence of economics, psychology, game theory, and neuroscience has opened new vistas—not just on how people think and behave, but also on how organizations function.
“Over the past two decades, academic insight and real-world experience have demonstrated, beyond much doubt, that when companies channel their competitive and collaborative instincts, embrace diversity, and recognize the needs and emotions of their employees, they can reap dividends in performance.
“The pioneering work of Nobel laureate and Harvard professor Eric Maskin in mechanism design theory represents one powerful application. Combining game theory, behavioral economics, and engineering, his ideas help an organization’s leaders choose a desired result and then design game-like rules that can realize it by taking into account how different independently acting, intelligent people will behave. The work of Professor Eyal Winter challenges and advances our understanding of what “intelligence” really means. In his latest book, Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think (PublicAffairs, 2014), Winter shows that although emotions are thought to be at odds with rationality, they’re actually a key factor in rational decision making.”
In the discussion, led by McKinsey partner Julia Sperling, a medical doctor and neuroscientist by training, and McKinsey Publishing’s David Schwartz, Maskin and Winter explore some of the implications of their work for leaders of all stripes.