Stefania Sitzia

Stefania is a Lecturer in Economics and a member of the Centre for Behavioural and Social Science (CBESS). She completed her PhD in 2011 at the University of East Anglia. She holds an MSc in economic from the same university and a BSc in Economics from the University of Cagliari (Italy). She is a behavioural economist with an interest in methodology. She has worked on  the role  of complexity in markets and individual decision making and in particular how complexity affects the quality of decisions. At the moment she is working on several experimental projects that aim at understanding how salience affects coordination in matching games with payoff asymmetry and how imposing a structure on large sets of options affects the quality of decisions. She has organised a conference on ‘The Conceptual Structure of Mathematical Economics’. She teaches Philosophy of Social Sciences, Introductory Microeconomics and Behavioural Economics Risk and Strategic Thinking. 

PhD Supervision Interests

Behavioural and experimental economics with a focus on focal points and consumers' behaviour (price complexity, energy tariffs and price shaping). Experimental and economic methodology.

Stefania has published several papers on the role of complexity (i.e. measured by the number of good,t ariffs or lottery outcomes) in markets for goods and services and in shaping preferences. She has also published a methodological paper on what implementing theoretical models in the laboratory can achieve. At the moment she is exploring how complexity can affect the quality of choices and whether imposing some order while keeping complexity constant, can offset these negative effects. She is also working on several projects that aim at understanding the reasons that lead payoff asymmetry to reduce the effectivness of focal points as coordination devices.