Falk awarded Yrjö Jahnsson Prize

CEPR Research Fellow Armin Falk has been awarded the 2011 Yrjö Jahnsson Prize. Falk is a Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn and a researcher in CEPR's Labour Economics Programme. The prize is awarded every second year by the Finnish Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation and the European Economic Association to the best economist(s) under the age of 45 "who has made a contribution that is significant to economics in Europe". The prize is the most prestigious award in European economics.

Announcing the award, the Foundation and the EEA said: "Armin Falk has made important contributions to the analysis of social preferences, in particular preferences for reciprocal fairness, and their impact on principal-agent relations, collective action and the functioning of labour markets. He studied the extent to which social preferences affect performance incentives and agents' performance in positive or negative ways. He has published a large number of papers in top journals, among which is the influential "A Theory of Reciprocity" (Games and Economic Behavior 2006, joint with Urs Fischbacher). This paper provides a formal model of preferences that incorporates the well established fact that humans not only care about the consequences of acts but also about the intentions that are revealed by the act. Then he shows that this model can explain a wide variety of puzzling experimental facts such as the willingness to accept an unfair outcome when it has been generated by a random event but to reject such an outcome when it has been purposefully generated by a human being. In other work, Falk has shown that social preferences may render explicit performance incentives counterproductive because such incentives - albeit they increase the performance of selfish agents - may even reduce the performance of agents with social preferences."