Jean-Paul Carvalho

Associate Professor of Economics and Interim Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

I am an economist working on game-theoretic approaches to social dynamics. This has taken me to new and emerging fields, including:

• Cultural transmission of preferences 
• Group identity 
• Social norms 
• Religious belief and organization
• Social learning in ‘large worlds’

My work has covered a number of subjects, including identity and economic underrepresentation, cultural resistance to social norms, social movements with reference-dependent preferences, coordination failure under heterogeneity, belief formation in groups, cultural polarization and religious radicalization. The aim is to understand the cultural foundations of economic and political institutions.

Aside from my primary appointment, I am co-editor of the volume Advances in the Economics of Religion (Palgrave 2019), Board Member of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC), Associate of the Network for Economic Research on Identity, Norms and Narratives (ERINN), Faculty Fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), Faculty Affiliate of the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization Center (ACO), the Center for Global Peace & Conflict Studies (CGPACS) and the Religious Studies Program at UC Irvine.

I was educated at Oxford (DPhil, MPhil, Monash scholar) and the University of Western Australia.

• IMBS Conference on Identity, Conflict and Cooperation, April 2018
• INET Conference, Panel on Identity, Norms, Narratives, Edinburgh, October 2017