Explore our English-taught programmes

Get a taste of Business Services

9 Nov 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

Join experts from Atlas Copco Group, KBC Global Services, Ingersoll Rand, and Deutsche Telekom for a practical sneak peek into one of Brno’s most international and fast-moving sectors.

Hande Erkut: Volunteer or Donate? How People Give under Context-Dependent Norms (MUES seminar)

12 Nov 2:00 PM

Why do people sometimes give time and at other times give money? We study how this choice is linked to context-specific norms. In an experiment comparing climate and history domains, we document that volunteering is seen as more appropriate in the climate context, while no clear norm favors either form of giving in the history context. This difference is mirrored in behavior: social norms are associated with volunteering when there is a social norm for volunteering, whereas personal norms are more closely associated with behavior when shared expectations are weak. Comparing stakeholders and spectators, we find no evidence that norm perceptions reflect motivated reasoning. Together, the results indicate that social norms are associated with behavior when a shared norm is present, whereas personal norms are more relevant when it is not. Hande Erkut is a postdoctoral researcher in the Market Behavior research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She is interested in ethics and how it influences and is influenced by decision making across different areas of life, such as social, economic, and health. Her research uses tools from behavioral and experimental economics. Sign up for a 1-to-1 meeting with Hande: https://is.muni.cz/tudle/jorv This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting

Deborah Nováková: Writing and presenting in the current academic world (MUES seminar)

13 Nov 9:00 AM

Deborah Nováková is the Head of the Academic Skills Center at CERGE-EI, where she has been teaching since August 2012. She has gained professional experience at the University of Birmingham, Maastricht University, and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, Canada. Her presentation will focus on the core skills needed for effective academic writing and presentations in today’s academic environment, highlighting common mistakes and offering practical guidance, particularly relevant for Ph.D. students and junior faculty members.

Diya Abraham: Upstream Corrections in Teams (MUES seminar)

18 Nov 11:00 AM

Members of a team may hesitate to override an authority figure even when they believe it is in the team’s best interest to do so. We investigate two explanations for this behavior: the authority’s task-relevant expertise, which we term their epistemic power, and the authority’s ability to influence team members’ earnings, which we term their deontic power. To study these explanations, we develop a theoretical model that distinguishes between two mechanisms underlying the decision to override: the weight individuals place on the authority’s advice and the perceived cost of acting against it. We estimate the model using data from two-person teams where we independently vary whether one member of the team has (i) epistemic power, operationalized through having their partner receive a noisy signal about their (task-relevant) expertise and (ii) deontic power, operationalized by giving them the opportunity to influence their partner's earnings in a team task. We find that deontic power has no detectable effect on the cost of overriding, either alone or when combined with epistemic power. However, in line with our hypotheses, a relatively weak signal of a team member's epistemic power increases substantially the weight their partner places on their advice thereby reducing the likelihood that they are overriden. We discuss the implications for hierarchical structures in organizations. Diya Abraham is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Economics at the University of Reading. Her research interests lie in the fields of behavioral and experimental economics. I use experiments to explore how trust manifests and is reciprocated in markets, principal-agent problems, and public goods games. At the University of Reading, she teaches Games and Economics Behaviour and Business Economics. In the past, she has taught Economics of Banking as well as a slightly more advanced game theory course and an undergraduate project-based course at WU Vienna. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting