June 1–2, 2026
Toulouse, TSE/IAST Building
The Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and the Toulouse School of Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences (TSE) will host the 13th annual workshop on Economics and Biology, themed Social Influence and its Macro-Consequences.
Background
In many types of decisions, people (and other animals) are influenced by what others have done in similar situations—either consciously or not—and in turn their choices affect others faced with similar decisions in the future. This observation cuts across fields and paradigms in the social sciences and it has been central in the study of many macro-level phenomena, such as the formation of social norms and conventions, cultural evolution, collective action, herding, technological lock-in, the unpredictability of success of cultural products, or the predictable patterns of the diffusion of innovations. While these topics have been the focus of different scientific communities, there is a set of questions common to all: What drives a population to collectively embrace one alternative over another? And when do collectives run the risk of adopting an inferior option purely based on an erratic, path-dependent decision process?
Recently a variety of both modeling and experimental paradigms have arisen that attempt to understand how social influence affects the way we make decisions and the consequences for the collective, but developments in different fields remain mostly separate. The goal of this workshop is to bring together scholars from these fields and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, both theoretically and empirically.
This year’s speakers lineup:
Ingela Alger, IAST
Pantelis Analytis, University of Southern Denmark
Andrea Baronchelli, City University of London
Jenna Bednar, University of Michigan
Cristina Bicchieri, University of Pennsylvania
Sara Constantino, Stanford University
Kaleda Denton, Santa Fe Institute
Maxime Derex, IAST
Charles Efferson, University of Lausanne
Vincenz Frey, University of Groningen
Mirta Galesic, Complexity Science Hub (cancelled)
Thomas Morgan, Arizona State University
Organizers: Alexandros Gelastopoulos, Marijn Keijzer, Sergey Gavrilets
Location: Toulouse School of Economics
Dates: June 1-2, 2026
Registration: Closed
Contact: For further information, please send an email to econbio@iast.fr
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This event is funded by a French government subsidy managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the framework of the investissements d'avenir programme reference ANR-17-EURE-0010.
Reference
13th Toulouse Economics and Biology Workshop, Toulouse, TSE/IAST Building, June 1–2, 2026.