Jose Manuel Rey
Tenured Associate Professor, Department of Economic Analysis, Complutense University of Madrid.
Prof. Rey has a B.Sc. in Mathematics (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). His primary research interest was geometric measure theory which is the theoretical branch of fractal geometry. He is a member of the PEDOFRACT group based at the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), whose research field is fractal geometry with applications to soil and environmental sciences. He is also a research scholar in the GilbertLab at the Psychology Department of Harvard University. His recent research is related with mathematical psychology, in particular with the modeling and analysis of romantic relationships, social interaction and well-being. He is also interested in behavioral economics, specifically in choice overload and, more recently on its effect on markets with price dispersion. He has have been always interested in the popularization of mathematics.
He first visited the Gilbert Lab in the first semester of 2015 invited by Professor Dan Gilbert, and he is an affiliate member of his lab since then. In 2015 Profs. Gilbert and Rey started a research project on “split bias” (Why do individuals divide their resources between two or more attractive options when, however, they should not do it?). During a subsequent visit to the Gilbert Lab again in the first semester of 2017, professors Gilbert and Rey started a new project, called “the orchestra effect” (How individual performance can be improved through social interdependence?) which is the theme of their current collaboration. During his third visit he has continued work regarding split bias, and obtained promising preliminary results using TED talks that were predicted by a theoretical model on symmetric options developed previously. Regarding the orchestra effect, in order to display the effect, Prof. Rey analyzed and scrutinized data from an experiment ran in Madrid with a joint work with a member of the lab, David Levari.