The UK and the US, along with France and Japan, are currently debating the release of their strategic oil reserves. This is in response to rising oil prices, today at $124 per barrel (Brent), threatening to destabilize an already fragile world economy. Despite its seemingly beneficial effects (i.e....

These are sad times for Europe. Three countries, Greece, Portugal and Ireland, are now dependent on external financing in order to repay their debt liabilities while Spain and Italy are widely muted to follow suit. Together they constitute more than 25% of the EU's GDP. The stakes are high.

One of the building blocks of modern economic thinking is the theory of rational expectations. The theory suggests that people develop expectations about future occurrences. However, in doing so, economic agents shape the actual outcomes by behaving according to their expectations. Hence, the economic outcomes we observe do not differ...

Norway witnessed an unprecedented tragedy on 22 July. Anders Behring Breivik's actions demonstrated in a vivid manner how human insanity, propelled by a twisted ideology, can justify the worst atrocities. However, at the same time, the immediate reaction to Breivik's attacks provided an excellent snapshot of how predictable biases affect...

Game theory, popularised to the wider public by the film 'A Beautiful Mind', offers a simple, yet extremely powerful, analogy to examine social interactions: the prisoner's dilemma. This proposition suggests that, under certain circumstances, individual decision-makers become worse-off by acting rationally!

This is exactly the situation Greece is now...