Professor Shaun Hargreaves Heap

Shaun Hargreaves Heap was an undergraduate at Oxford, did his PhD at UC Berkeley and taught in the School of Economics, University of East Anglia, before coming to King’s in 2013. He has also held visiting positions at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Sydney.

Research subject area

Experimental economics

Research

Shaun's current research using laboratory experiments is on the social influences (e.g. the role of group membership and the influence of peers) on individual decision making. He has also used online survey experiments to examine people’s post COVID-19 policy preferences.  

Teaching

• Macroeconomics
• Behavioural Economics
• Political Economy

PhD Supervision

Shaun will consider PhD supervision of any student who plans to use experiments in their PhD. He will also consider applications that are at the interface between economics and philosophy.

Selected publications

• How does group identification affect redistribution in representative democracies’ (with E. Manifold. K. Matakos, and D. Xefteris)  Journal of Public Economics, 2022 (online, 215).
• ‘Vote and Voice: An experiment on the effects of inclusive governance rules’ (with K. Tsutsui and D. Zizzo). Social Choice and Welfare 2020 54(1), 111-139.
• ‘Preference conformism: an experiment’ (with E. Fatas and D. Rojo Arjona), European Economic Review, 2018, 105, 71-82.
• ‘Social information ‘nudges’: an experiment with multiple group references’ (with A.Ramalingam and D. Rojo-Arjona), Southern Economic Journal , 2017, 84(1), 348-365
• ‘Co-ordination when there are restricted and unrestricted options’ (with R. Sugden and D. Rojo-Ajona), Theory and Decision, 2017, 83(1), 107-129.
• 'The Political Influence of Peer Groups: Experimental Evidence in the Classroom’ (with C. Campos and F. Lopez de Leon), Oxford Economic Papers, 2017, 69(4), 963-985.
• ‘Endowment inequality in public goods games: a re-examination’ (with A. Ramaligan and B. Stoddard’, Economic Letters, 2016, 146 (September), 4-7.
• ‘How portable is level-0 behavior? A test of Level-k theory in games with non-neutral frames’, (with D. Rojo-Arjona and R. Sugden), Econometrica, 2014, 82(3), 1133-1151.
• ‘The value of groups’ (with D. Zizzo), American Economic Review, 99, March 2009, 295-323.
• ‘Some experimental evidence on the evolution of discrimination, co-operation and the perception of fairness’ (with Y. Varoufakis), Economic Journal, July 2002, p.679-703.