Events

The Penn Symposium on Fostering and Financing Long-Term Investments in Prevention and Protection

The Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania
December 13-14, 2010

Co-sponsors: The Wharton School, Penn School of Medicine, Leonard Davis Institute, Wharton Climate Center (formerly Wharton Center for Risk Management and Decision Processes)

Academic Directors: David A. Asch, MD (Medicine), Howard Kunreuther (Wharton), Robert Meyer (Wharton), and Mark Pauly (Wharton)

Objective: To foster cross-field learning on the problem of how best to encourage individuals and communities to invest in protection against harm from uncertain future events such as disease, natural hazards, and man-made catastrophes, and to formulate a set of new fundable research projects in this area.  The idea for symposium was born in our observation that while the problem of how to encourage long-term investments in protection has been studied by multiple fields over the years, progress has often been hindered by the relative absence of interactions among scholars working in different domains, as well as between academics and policy makers.  Hence, the objective of the symposium is to fuse these areas, pooling what we know about:

1. How individuals think about the future and make decisions to invest in protection against future harm; 
2. How to encourage people to make such protective investments, be it via persuasive messages, the development of social norms, or by providing explicit financial incentives; and
3. How to manage the cost of long-term prevention as a society, such as  how to design long-term health and property insurance contracts given (1) and (2) above) and the implications of all this for public policy.

The emphasis of the conference will be on dialogue and the creation of new research ideas.

Day 1, AM:  The basic psychology of forward planning and thinking; or why we (often) fail to protect against future harm

Day 1, PM:  New approaches to and strategies for overcoming myopia biases through communication, defaults, mechanisms to create social norms, etc.

Day 2, AM: New approaches to financial management of losses, particularly of a catastrophic nature

Day 2, PM: Small group break-outs where interdisciplinary teams define new research projects that will be considered for seed funding by the Wharton Risk Center and Leonard Davis Institute.