ERC Starting Grant for Fellow Aurélien Baillon
ESE-TI doctoral director and research fellow Aurélien Baillon has been awarded a Starting Grant of € 1.5 million from the European Research Council (ERC) for his research project “Unverifiable Truths”.
ERC grants are among the most prestigious grants in the world. ERC Starting Grants aim to support up-and-coming research leaders who are about to establish a proper research team and to start conducting independent research in Europe. The scheme targets promising researchers who have the proven potential of becoming independent research leaders.
Aurelien’s project, entitled “Bayesian markets for unverifiable truths” will develop a new approach to get correct answers to questions that are otherwise unverifiable, e.g. concerning one’s happiness or the estimated likelihood of dramatic fatal events. The ERC jury lauded the potential impact of the research project that may go well beyond the realm of economics: “This creative research project is novel and compelling. It is very ambitious, but well articulated. It has the potential to have an important impact across all social sciences. Consequently, the proposed research has a high upside, especially if the methodology – which is completely appropriate and very carefully thought out – can be rolled out for large surveys as well”.
About Aurélien Baillon
Since Until October 2014, Aurélien Baillon (1980) has been endowed professor of economics of uncertainty at the Erasmus School of Economics (EUR). He joined the ESE in 2007 after receiving a PhD in economics from Arts et Metiers Paristech in France. His research interests include behavioral economics, experimental economics, learning, risk and uncertainty. Aurélien published, among others, in the American Economic Journal (2011, twice), Journal of Risk and Uncertainty and Games and Behavior. His forthcoming publication is in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics with TI fellow Han Bleichrodt.
In 2014, Aurélien Baillon was awarded a Vidi grant of € 800.000 by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) for his research project ‘Beyond rational expectations’, 2014-2019. He received an NWO Veni grant (€ 250.000) in 2010. Learn more about Aurélien on his personal website.