This is the provisional schedule of the conference, please note that in the run up to the event, there may be some changes. For any questions about the schedule, please see the contact us page for details.

15.FEB.2008, FRIDAY

14:30 - 17:00 : Registration
17:00 - 18:00 : Opening Reception (Capital One Speaker)
18:15 - 18:30 : Opening Address
18:30 - 19:30 : Paul Ormerod
"21st Century Economics"
Empirical research in behavioural and experimental economics undermines the postulate of the rational, maximising agent. In general, agents gather limited information, reason poorly, and act intuitively, rather than rationally. Economic theory should be re-built on these more realistic foundations. Can it be done? How can we go about doing this?
19:30 - 20:30 : Philippe Legrain
“Immigration in a globalised world”
Immigration divides our globalising world like no other issue. It jangles nerves about jobs, welfare, race, culture, and even terrorism. Philippe Legrain has written the first book that looks beyond the headlines. Why are ever-rising numbers of people from poor countries arriving in Europe, North America, and Australasia? Can they be kept out? Should they even try? In our open world, more people will inevitably move across borders, Philippe says, and we should generally welcome them. They do the jobs we can't or won't do, and their diversity enriches us all. Left and right, free-marketeers, campaigners for global justice, enlightened patriots, all should rally behind freer migration, because They need Us and We need Them
20:30 - 20:45 : Interval
20:45 - 21:45 : Kori Udovicki
"Capacity building as Development Assistance: (How) Can We Help Institutions Do Their Work?"
Misgivings about the effectiveness of international development assistance range from the mainstream view expressed in the Paris Declaration to the scathing critique of authors such as William Easterly. Scepticism is particularly acute in the case of Middle Income Countries (MICs), because they benefit from private capital flows into emerging markets that make development aid look superfluous. The view of a practitioner with both development agency and beneficiary government experience is that aid works best in building institutions and helping adapt theoretical models to local realities (“indigenization”). However, this is an area in which the development community is weak. Obstacles range from the sociology of economic development research to the political agenda behind much of the development assistance. The aid community can do better. In striving to improve, it can draw lessons from MIC’s and transition economies, where support in institution-building and indigenization is really the only form of assistance that makes sense.
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16.FEB.2008, SATURDAY

09:00 - 10:00 : Breakfast
10:15 - 11:15 : Tim Harford
"The Logic of Life: The rational economics of an irrational world"
Life often seems to defy logic. When a prostitute agrees to unprotected sex, or a teenage criminal embarks on a burglary, or a smoker lights another cigarette, we seem to be a million miles from what we would call rational behaviour. None of this makes sense – or does it? At Warwick Economics Summit 2008, Tim Harford will launch his new book, The Logic of Life, in which he argues that it does. By weaving stories from locations as diverse as a Las Vegas casino and a Soho speed-date together with insights from an ingenious new breed of economist, he aims to persuade you that we are all, in fact, surprisingly logical.
11:15 - 12:15 : John Kay
"More Truth about Markets: property, risk and market failure"
Rational economic man dies out because no one would want to mate with him! John Kay has learnt and taught that rational, consistent, self-interested economic behaviour would predominate because evolution would favour that behaviour. Well, it doesn’t. Evolution favours behaviour that fits the social, political, and physical environment in which it is found. Hence, market economies operate in a social context. Economic and other institutions evolve together. The real story of the successes and failures of markets, therefore, is more complex (and more interesting) than the story most economists tell.
12:15 - 12:45 : Interval
12:45 - 13:45 : David Myddelton
“They Meant Well: government project disasters”
If governments ‘meant well’ in embarking on large quasi-commercial projects over the past 85 years, what went wrong?  Why were they so financially disastrous?  They have failed to complete safety trials (R.101 Airship), arrange pilot production (Groundnut Scheme), understand costs (nuclear power), identify customers (Concorde), and let the market work (Channel Tunnel Rail Link and Millennium Dome).  These complex projects involved technology, economics, politics, and management. Politicians seek re-election above everything else and have neither the experience nor the incentives to bring about commercial success. Will they ever learn?  
13:45 - 14:45 : Lunch
15:00 - 16:00 : Edgar Peters
“Method and Madness: Integrating Complexity, Behavioural Finance, and Efficient Markets”
Traditional capital market theory says that markets are efficient because investors are rational. The new school of behavioural finance says the opposite. Rather than solving problems rationally, individuals tend to make biased decisions using pattern recognition techniques. However, what is rational and irrational may depend upon the type of problem we wish to solve, and the method we use to solve it. If the market problem is objective, then cool reason should prevail. However, if the market is a complex system, then the value of data would be ambiguous, making it more rational to use pattern recognition techniques. In this talk we will find that rational investors would indeed keep certain types of miss-pricing from happening. Likewise, human behaviour and market complexity cause miss-pricing that cannot be arbitraged away. This talk deals with rational and irrational markets by integrating efficient markets, behavioural finance, and complex systems into a non-mathematical model.
16:00 - 16:45 : Networking & Coffee
16:45 - 17:45 : Alex Singleton
"Globalisation and its Enemies"
Critics of globalisation are all around. The main group are reactionary critics. They see a world going in the wrong direction at the expense of the environment, and that we should deal with poverty through redistribution, instead of unsustainable wealth creation. However, thanks to globalisation, hundreds of millions of people will be lifted out of poverty this year. 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus predicted that living standards would decline as population and consumption increase. The opposite has occurred. Scarcity of a resource encourages businesses to be more efficient, to invest in new technologies to harness alternative
resources. Alex Singleton holds this view. Those who lobby against growth, against foreign holidays, and against the downward pressure on prices that globalisation brings, are cutting against human nature. But who will have the last word?
19:00 - LATE : Dinner and Dance

17.FEB.2008, SUNDAY

10:00 - 11:00 : Brunch
11:00 - 12:00 : Sam Williams (Frontier Economics)
"Why micro economics is getting bigger"
Economic consultancy has, until fairly recently, been regarded as a niche market.  Consequently, many economics students are still unaware of what a career in this area entails.  Sam Williams (of Frontier Economics) will provide insights into working as a micro economist within a consulting arena.  In doing so, he'll discuss the growing recognition by firms and governments of the value economics can add to a wide range of issues. To illustrate this, Sam will present a case a study concerning Frontier's work on the incentives arising from health sector reform in the UK.
12:00 - 12:30 : Networking & Coffee
12:30 - 13:30 : Stefan Biesdorf
"From Web2.0 to Enterprise2.0"
Digital communities in the Internet, often loosely referred to as "Web 2.0", have created a new success story. Players like YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia are well known throughout the global user community. Meanwhile, however, the trend has also arrived in the enterprise space. Many large corporations have started to apply Web 2.0 tools and methods. With such "Enterprise 2.0" solutions, they seek either to improve the productivity of internal resources - typically knowledge workers - or to connect digital communities outside the company with the internal value chain - thereby creating sustainable competitive advantages. Several case studies illustrate how large corporations (and small attackers) are succeeding with Enterprise 2.0 and reveal the underlying business logic.
13:30 - 14:30 : Stephen King
"When Worlds Collide"
This talk considers why globalisation is nothing new. Why does it progress in fits and starts with sudden, and damaging, reversals? How does it contribute to income inequality at the same time as adding to resource efficiency? We will discuss how the current economic cycle has been affected by globalisation and why the sub-prime crisis is a global, not a US story. We will also see why central banks no longer enjoy the independence they once had.
14:30 - 15:00 : Closing Address