PAUL DOLAN

Thank you for visiting my site.

Current research

There are two main themes to my work.

The first focuses on developing measures of happiness and subjective well-being that can be used in policy, particularly in the valuation of non-market goods and in ‘joining-up’ the impact of changes in health, crime, the environment etc. Amongst other things, we are currently looking at the happiness hit of the 2012 Olympic Games by measuring happiness in London, Paris and Berlin across three years. We are already finding some interesting differences across the three cities, and also according to how we ask the questions.

The second considers ways in which the lessons from the behavioural sciences can be used to understand and change individual behaviour. This work is focussing on the important role that situational factors play in influencing our behaviour. Amongst other things, we are currently looking at how people change their energy consumption in response to information about other people’s energy consumption (and it changes quite a bit), and also at whether people eat more when they are incentivised to exercise (and they do eat more, quite a lot more in fact).

I am particularly interested in lab and field experiments. Human beings are not especially good at predicting their behaviour, and not much better at recalling the reasons for it, and so, where possible, we must observe the animal in its natural environment.
For an overview of what I’m up to, and to help you sleep at night, please take a look at my public lecture at LSE earlier in 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJgTVCP4tw0&feature=youtu.be

Personal details

Position: Professor of Behavioural Science

Address: Department of Social Policy, LSE, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE

Email: p.h.dolan@lse.ac.uk

Visit my profile at the LSE Website:  Click Here

Degrees and awards

Philip Leverhulme Prize in Economics (2002) for contribution to health economics

D.Phil. Econ, University of York “Issues in the valuation of health outcomes” (1997)

M.Sc. (Econ, with distinction), University of York (1991)

B.Sc. (Econ), University of Swansea (1989)

Current professional activities

• Chief Academic Advisor on Economic Appraisal, Government Economic Service
• Member of Measuring National Wellbeing Advisory Forum
• Member of Advisory Panel on subjective wellbeing, National Academy of Sciences
• Co-director, Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health
• Co-investigator, Understanding Behaviour Change Research Centre, DfE
• Visiting Professor, Imperial College London
• Associate, Institute for Government
• Associate Editor, Journal of Economic Psychology

 

Career highlights

My first achievements were in developing ways of valuing health so that resources can be allocated more efficiently. The most important innovation has been the explicit consideration of preferences for health states, which has led to the widespread use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) around the world. My work on QALYs has also led to advances outside of health e.g. in the way the UK Home Office values the intangible victim costs of crime.

My research then focussed on how to account for fairness in measures of benefit, developing ways to weight QALYs according to potentially important characteristics of the recipient.

These contributions were recognised in a professorship in health economics in 2000 (at the age of 32) and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Economics in 2002 for my contribution to health economics and QALYs.

The policy impact of my work in health was recognised more widely by my appointment in 2008 as Chief Academic Advisor to the UK Government Economic Service on Economic appraisal, which involves developing the Treasury Green Book (the manual for cost-benefit analysis).

My international reputation has been further advanced by an invitation from Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman to work with him at Princeton in 2004-5. Our 2008 paper in the Economic Journal is the most cited paper in that journal since that year.

Since my time at Princeton, I have focussed on more direct measures of wellbeing. I have been developing measures that capture hedonic and non-hedonic experiences. Accounting for the ‘reward’ (purpose and meaning) associated with daily activities and capturing the effects of ‘intrusive thoughts’ on wellbeing both go beyond what is being captured by existing measures and are at the cutting edge of wellbeing measurement. I now have 14 publications in this area.

I am a member of the National Wellbeing Advisory Forum for the Office of National Statistics in the UK, and was lead author of a report that made the recommendations to the ONS about what happiness questions to include in large-scale national surveys. I am also advising the National Academy of Sciences in the US on measurement issues in happiness research.

Over the past few years, I have begun exploring the influences of automatic responses on individual behaviour, and how these relate to our preferences, health and wellbeing. Last year, I was an author of the “Mindspace” report for the UK Cabinet Office. “Mindspace” is a mnemonic for the nine most robust effects on behaviour that operate largely, but not exclusively, through our automatic system (the part of our brain that responds unconsciously to contextual influences).

I have always worked collaboratively and across disciplines: I am driven by important research and policy questions, not by disciplinary silos. In many ways, most of my research has been at the cutting edge of the interface between economics and psychology (loosely called behavioural economics). I have published papers and won research grants with economists, psychologists, philosophers, criminologists and medics.

I was Founder-Director of the Centre for Wellbeing in Public Policy at the University of Sheffield, which brought together, for the first time, colleagues from across all the social sciences and public health, and is still considered as one of the leading inter-disciplinary research centres on wellbeing.

At Imperial College, I am a Visiting Professor and have developed joint research with colleagues in the Medical School, including Lord Ara Darzi. At LSE, I am associated with the Behavioural Research Lab, bringing together behavioural researchers from all departments of LSE. I am Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health and a lead on the Centre for Understanding Behaviour in Education, both interdisciplinary centres.

 

Previous employment

2010-2011       Seconded member of Behavioural Insights Team, Cabinet Office, UK.

2006-2009       Professor of Economics, Imperial College Business School

2000-2006       Professor of Health Economics, University of Sheffield.

1998-2000       Senior Lecture then Reader in Health Economics, University of Sheffield.

1994-1998       Lecturer in Economics, Universities of Newcastle and York.

1991-1994       Research Fellow, Centre for Health Economics, University of York.

 

Other previous positions

2005-2006      Founder-Director, Centre for Well-being in Public Policy, Sheffield.

2004-2005      Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University (with Prof D. Kahneman).

2000-2003      Professor II in Health Economics, University of Oslo.