Stafetten runder nu sin 4. omgang og er denne gang sendt videre fra Jakob Roland Munch til Elena Paltseva. Stafettens første kvindelige deltager har besvaret spørgsmålene på engelsk:

Where is your favorite place to eat in Copenhagen?
I do not really have a favorite restaurant - I care much more about the company I am out with... One of my recent very nice experiences was at the sushi place called "Green Sushi" close to Kongens Nytorv - they also had a very nice veggie sushi selection.

If you should recommend a good book, which one would it be?
I just started reading a book called "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. I do not yet know if I will eventually recommend it to anyone, but so far it is interesting. It discusses the quality of medical research, and, especially, how its results are misrepresented by the popular media. I realize that this is a pop-medicine book, like "Freakonomics" is a pop-economics one, but it still suggests a lot of things to think about. Also, more generally, I think some of the messages in the book are valid for economics too.

What, is anything, should have realized earlier in your life?
That there is not only black and white, but also shades.

What is the best part of your job?
Discovering something new every day.

Which bill do you hate to pay the most?
The DR TV-fee. I do not watch TV. I do not even know if my TV still works, switched it on once or twice since moving to Denmark!

What is the most beautiful result in economics and why?
Let me name a concept instead - Nash equilibrium, that is, the idea, that each player behaves in its best interest taking the actions of the other people as given. The beauty of this concept is that it allows to analyze drastically different situations (not necessarily economic ones) from a common strategic perspective - a very powerful property! We had a discussion the other day with the colleagues on the importance of luck in economics and other sciences. One of the questions that we were talking about was if Nash was just lucky discovering his equilibrium and what would happen if he were not to. We almost universally agreed that somebody else would come up with this idea within a couple of years - this concept was a natural evolution of game theory at that point and, there was a high demand for a concept like this from economics and other areas where game theory can be applied. Since then it has become one of the most used tools in economics ever.
Of course, this concept has its limitations, but many of them we can deal with - for example, we can extend this concept on the situation when people are altruistic and not selfish, or when people are boundedly rational etc. Here is a nice link if you want to read a bit more about it (and note that it is twice as long as was Nash's original article that brought him a Nobel prize (2 pages)!)

Which famous economist would you like to spend an afternoon with?
Roger Myerson. I was lucky to have a short conversation with him at one of the conferences and that was very interesting.

What is the most important lesson, learnt from the financial crisis?
Ooh.. that is a difficult one.. Maybe that the degree of interconnection of the world economy should not be underestimated?

Læs med næste gang og se hvem Elena Paltseva har sendt stafetten videre til.

Tidligere stafetter:

Christian Hjort-Andersen

Bertel Schjerning

Jakob Roland Munch

STAFET: Elena Paltseva

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