Keynote Speakers

Marc Fleurbaey (Paris School of Economics)

"On equity weights in BCA"

Equity weights are the essential bridge between BCA and a sound welfare evaluation, as in their absence, BCA is unfair and possibly inconsistent. But practitioners and decision-makers often resist using equity weights and consider them fraught with value judgments, as such weights necessarily incorporate interpersonal comparisons and a chosen degree of inequality aversion. Actually, ordinary unweighted BCA also incorporates interpersonal comparisons (namely, in money-metric utility) and a particular and a rather extreme degree of inequality aversion (namely, zero). In this lecture, I would like to defend money-metric utility as a reasonable approach (among others) to interpersonal comparisons and discuss practical steps to apply this approach in a way that is in line with consistent social welfare analysis.

Phoebe Koundouri (Athens University of Economics and Business) 

"Science- Based Sustainability Transformation: A Historical Challenge with a Wealth of Opportunities"

Given the current era of multiple interconnected crisis (climate change, biodiversity collapse, COVID-19 pandemic, inflationary pressures, population and inequality increase, energy and food supply shortages, geopolitical instability) and based on the 2021 and 2022 UN SDSN reports on the "Transformations for the Joint Implementation of Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the European Green Deal" that I lead, the first part of my keynote speech will connect the dots between four major policy initiatives – the SDGs, the European Green Deal, the European Semester, and the EU recovery plan, and showcase actionable strategies for policymakers that can guide EU-wide and national economic recovery in line with the EU's overarching sustainability agenda. I will also argue that the transformation to sustainability should be science-and-innovation-driven and introduce relevant aspects of my work (research projects, innovation accelerators and science-policy interface building) under the Alliance of Excellence for Research & Innovation on Aephoria that I lead. One crucial element of the sustainability transformation derives from the fact that in most instances, objective probabilities about future events are difficult to estimate. In the second part of my keynote based on Pittis, Koundouri et al., I will argue that although there exists empirical evidence of ambiguity aversion (aversion to unknown probabilities) violating Subjective Expected Utility axioms,  ambiguity aversion can dissolve into time-inconsistency, if the agent forms her probabilistic beliefs within the context of modern Bayesianism (MB). This result points to the need for training decision-makers in time-consistent decision-making and BCA.