Labex "Economics and Decision Making Studies" (ECODEC)

ECODEC is a LabEx (for Laboratoires d’Excellence, that is to say, Research Departments of Excellence) dedicated to Economics and Decision Making Studies, merging researchers and teachers in economics and statistics of ENSAE ParisTech, and its research department, the CREST, of the Ecole Polytechnique, and of HEC. It is a founding step of a large Initiative of Excellence (IdEx) launched by Paris-Saclay University, gathering 11 LabEx in every field of science, and with the precise objective to build an internationally-reknown center in economics and decision making studies. As such, it works in close collaboration with all the members of Paris-Saclay University, such as the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Paris XI University, the CEA, Agro ParisTech or INRA.

ECODEC is aimed at promoting research work undertaken by researchers of participating entities, implementing high-level training programs (PhD, training for top-level civil servants…), building partnerships with private companies, espacially in sectors such as marketing, data analysis, strategic management, HR, or corporate decision evaluation.

The LabEx Economics and Decision Sciences (ECODEC) will focus its efforts around a central theme “Regulating the Economy at the Service of Society”. The economists, decision scientists, management scientists, and statisticians taking part into this project work jointly to come up with solutions to address the questions of the present. The economy when left to its own course drifts away from the collective optimum. Hence, regulations derived from the best theoretical and empirical research using the most recent methods must be devised for society’s various stakeholders.

Projects undertaken in ECODEC will study the economic and social impediments to innovations in the labor, financial and product markets, in order to help alleviate them and enhance welfare in our society. The research agenda is articulated into five research areas, one centered on each of these three types of markets and two transversal areas:

Area 1: Secure Careers in a Global Economy

This area mixes a macro-labor perspective and lessons from human resources in order to help devise policies aiming at providing workers with security in an environment where jobs-to-jobs mobility is necessary to foster corporate productivity.

Area 2: Financial Market Failures and Regulation

This area aims at providing research output guiding the decisions of financial-market regulators. Given that new financial products are increasingly complex and that links between financial institutions tight and far from transparent, a need for new regulatory tools is more and more necessary.

Area 3: Decision-Making and Market Regulation

This area starts from the growing evidence for the limited rationality and cognitive ability of consumers, and studies the necessary regulations to ensure better consumers’ protection. In a world in which economic agents are not perfectly informed, product markets and competition should be regulated.

Area 4: Evaluating the Impact of Public Policies and Firms’ Decision

This first transversal area provides techniques to assess the quality of public policies and corporate decisions. It more preciselly focuses on estimating the causal effect of these policies and decisions.

Area 5: New Challenges for New Data

This second transversal area examines the new statistical and economic questions that arise with the emergence of the new data sources created by our global economy. Indeed, such data sets are necessary for proper evaluation or a more transparent society. They simultaneously create new opportunities but also new threats, all studied in this area.