Summary
Mark Pingle has a joint University appointment as a professor of economics and professor of entrepreneurship. Professor Pingle has scores of publications in macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and experimental economics. He has served as Chair of the University Department of Economics and president of the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics. Desiring to more personally facilitate economic development in Northern Nevada, he has shifted a large portion of his efforts toward the development of entrepreneurial talent. He spearheaded the effort to create the entrepreneurship program at University of Nevada, Reno, subsequently spearheaded the creation of Entrepreneurship Nevada meeting, and remains devoted to seeing entrepreneurial capacities developed at the University and in the community.
Recent Research
- The Art of Experimental Economics
- Helping Addicts: When can trying to do good be dysfunctional?
- The Empathy Game: Can trust be supported without positive material reciprocity?
- A bounded rationality explanation for hyperbolic discounting
- Might ambiguity exist when none seems to exist?
- An overlapping generations model with irreversible capital and transfer of firm ownership through a stock market
Professor Mark Pingle does research in behavioral economics, experimental economics, and macroeconomics. Behavioral economics seeks to understand why people make decisions as they do, often running experiments to gather data on decisions people make under controlled conditions. Behavioral economics not only uses the tools of traditional economics, which standardly assumes people make optimal choices, behavioral economics often borrows ideas from psychology and other disciplines to understand choice behaviors that seem irrational or are surprising in some other way. Professor Pingle has recently focused on understanding why people trust when it seems they should not and how our limited cognitive capabilities can lead us to make odd or bad decisions. Macroeconomics seeks to understand how the economy works as a whole system. Since graduate school days, professor Pingle has worked on further developing the important “overlapping generations model,” so we can better understand what determines interest rate levels, economic growth, and “bubbles” that can burst and cause economic hardships.
Education
- B.S. in Economics, Southern Oregon State College, 1983
- M.A. in Economics, University of Southern California, 1984
- Ph.D. in Economics, University of Southern California, 1988