Download Panel Sessions As a reminder, panel sessions are 60 minutes long

Panel Sessions
As a reminder, panel sessions are 60 minutes long, and consist of four short (7 minute) talks,
followed by 30 minutes of moderated discussion among all four panellists. Note that this gives, on
average, the same overall time to each speaker as does a traditional conference (15 minutes each),
but within a more interactive format.
We currently have these panel sessions in mind. Note that each session is structured around a topic
that cuts across ecology and economics.
Intelligence, Rationality and Decision Making
Unlike most of the interactions that have formed the universe around us, economic and ecological
interactions are driven by agents – humans or other organisms – that are intelligent, and directed.
The agents process information, then decide how to act to achieve a certain goal. How have
ecologists an economists theorized about such intelligent behaviour, what have they learned, and
can similar concepts be applied in both domains? How rational are humans, and how intelligent are
organisms?
Example sub-topics: Learning, decision making under uncertainty, bounded rationality, consumer
choice, utility theory, prospect theory // optimal foraging, ideal free distribution, decision making in
organisms, life history theory,
Heterogeneity, Diversity and Inequality
When theorizing about groups of individuals, it is tempting to imagine that the individuals within the
group are all the same – but this is never the case. There are usually important individual-toindividual differences. Ecologists and economists are coming to realize not only that we need to
recognize and study such differences, but also that these differences are often key to the healthy
functioning of the group. In many cases, groups without differences would stagnate, fail, or exhibit
wildly chaotic dynamics. Then again, ecological and economic dynamics can amplify differences in
ways that we would usually consider pathological, most notably, in amplifying inequality among
humans.
Example sub-topics: beliefs, knowledge, asset price dynamics, inequality, appetite for risk, size and
stability // diversity vs stability, scramble vs contest competition, asymmetric competition, size
hierarchies, self-thinning, social structure within groups, asymmetry of information
Competition, Cooperation and Coexistence
The concept of competition is absolutely central to both ecology and economics. Many ecological
and economic observations follow from the fact that organisms – and humans – compete for limiting
resources, and this competition provides an engine for innovation and improvement via markets or
natural selection, in turn leading to a diverse set of individuals, companies and species that occupy
different ‘niches’. More recently however, economists and ecologists have been rediscovering the
potential importance of cooperation and facilitation, which appear to be relatively more important
in harsher ecological and economic environments. Could it be the case that the historical focus on
competition has resulted from the fact that these subjects matured in natural and cultural
environments that were atypically competitive? And if we redress this imbalance to recognize the
importance of cooperation in shaping economies and ecosystems, how does that change our view of
the world?
Example topics: Niche, trade-offs, limiting similarity, neutrality, facilitation, mutualism, co-evolution
// cooperative game theory, non-cooperative game theory, industrial organisation, imperfect
competition, creative commons, pre-market economies
Stability and Robustness
What makes some economies and ecosystems, at some times, inherently stable vs unstable in terms
of their internal dynamics, and / or robust vs fragile to external pressures? Diversity? Then what kind
of diversity? Compartmentalization and redundancy? How can we measure that? Are more
productive systems more, or less, stable? Are systems that resist change more, or less, stable than
those that bend more easily? And can some aspects of the same system be unstable, when other
aspects are unstable?
Example topics: Financial crises, interactions and markets, herding and contagion, endogenous risk,
trade and division of labour, systemic risk // diversity vs stability, redundancy, rescue effects, trophic
cascades, redundancy in ecosystems, neutrality, demographic stochasticity
Global Variation in Economies and Ecosystems
Ecological and economic systems have been shaped by such different pressures, and have such
varied histories that it is not surprising that they should differ so markedly. After decades of
collecting quantitative ecological and econometric information, what have we learned about this
global variation? Among all this wonderful variation, are their signs of predictability and
repeatability? Can we generalize about what kind of systems develop under what kind of conditions,
and how this development occurs – and use this knowledge to monitor and manage real systems?
Example topics: Global econometrics, development, institutions, investment, GDP growth, capital.
Clusters of economies, trade // biomes, trophic structures, trait distributions, biogeograhich
patterns, macroecological laws / rules, top-down vs bottom up, whole system modelling,
predictability vs contingency
Tipping Points
Complex, multi-component, non-linear systems, such as ecosystems or economies, are thought to be
liable to distinctly non-linear responses to external pressures. Most worrying is the possibility of a
‘tipping point’ response, characterized by a slight response, followed by a sudden, irreversible (or
difficult to reverse) collapse, often accompanied by an increase in system ‘noise’. That’s the theory
at least! Are there examples of tipping points that have been observed in reality? What were there
causes? In general, can tipping points be anticipated by looking for ‘early warning signals’?
Example topics: early warning signals, non-linear responses, hysteresis, noise, alternate stable states
// financial crises, positive and negative feedback loops, sentiment, time lags
Networks
Networks – maps of connections among individuals or higher levels of organization such as species,
nations, habitat patches, or companies – are thought to be useful summaries of complex economic
or ecological systems. In recent years ecologists and economists, as well as mathematicians,
computer scientists and sociologists, have made great strides in collecting, characterizing and
analysing networks. How do different kinds of ecological and economic networks compare? What
can networks tell us about the underlying determinants of interactions, and / or the dynamics and
stability of the whole system?
Example topics: Interactions and markets, trade and division of labour, social structure and power
networks, information flow // underlying structure / logic of ecological networks, trophic cascades,
dynamic consequences of network structure, comparing networks, rewiring,
Resources and Supply Chains
Ecosystems and economies exist within physical constraints imposed by limiting resources, but
which resources are in short supply for which individuals, species, companies and nations varies
markedly in time and space. Moreover, as these resources move through the systems they become
recombined in important ways. Herbivores take in high carbon, low nitrogen food, shedding carbon
into the detritivore system and becoming the perfect mix of carbon and nitrogen for the carnivores,
which themselves become food for still other carnivores. Industry packages raw materials into
components, which become recombined into still other components before they become products
(which then, increasingly, become recycled). Discuss!
Example topics: global value chains, Competitiveness, Multiple Resources, Substitutability, Resources
and Sustainability // trophic structure, stoichiometry, limiting resources, R* theory, pollution /
bioaccumulation
Evolution
It’s hard to conceptualize or model systems made up of evolving parts – but without such evolution
the components would not exist in the first place. In ecology, the concept, and ongoing reality of,
evolution through natural selection is broadly appreciated, but nonetheless difficult to incorporate
into ecological study. Moreover, ecologists are increasingly realizing that the traditional assumption
that evolution is too slow to matter to ecological studies will often not hold. The concept of
continually competing, developing and changing entities is at the very heart of economics, but is this
analogous to evolution in nature?
Example topics: adaptive dynamics, convergent evolution, role of history and contingency, coupled
evol-ecol dynamics, co-evolution (hosts-parasites, or mutualisms) // complex evolutionary systems
in behavioural finance, market selection and asset pricing, evolutionary finance
Randomness, Uncertainty and Unpredictability
God may not play dice, but economies and ecosystems, like subatomic particles, certainly do. To
some extent everything is random, and to a large extent everything is uncertain, both to the
individual agents at the heart of ecosystems and economies, and to those poor souls who devote
their lives to studying them. What happens when, instead of ignoring such randomness and
uncertainty, we make it central to our thinking?
Example topics: decision making under uncertainty, forecasting markets, risk measurement,
dynamics of stochastic models, neutrality, noise, even chaos, data / models / decisions, uncertainty
in structure vs parameters, what can we predict?, process-driven vs phenomenological models
Movement, Migration; Dispersal, Demography
All humans, and all organisms, move. In the short term, individuals exhibit daily and seasonal
patterns of movement to track daily or seasonal opportunities. In the longer term, individuals
sometimes make much bigger jumps, especially when they first mature (think, children leaving
home, or seeds scattering in the wind). Moreover, such movements are strongly constrained by the
physical environment, and by agents of dispersal such as seed-dispersing animals, or established
transport links among cities and nations. The result of all of this moving around is a complex, shifting
pattern of connections among otherwise remote locations, ecosystems and economies that
redistributes resources, spreads innovation and creates new opportunities for hybridization among
species, cultures, and ideas.
Example topics: cities and transport, migration and urban dynamics, population and community
dynamics, scaling of cities, modelling the human species, population growth // animal migration
paths, connections among ecosystems, movement ecology, dispersal, intelligent movement /
dispersal
Disturbance and Non-Equilibrium
Academics tend to like a steady life, and they tend to like to think of economies and ecosystems as
being near or at a stable, equilibrium state. If only! Instead, economies and ecosystems, like
academics, are continually hit with unexpected disturbances from the micro the macro scale – whilst
the ‘equilibrium’, which is never reached, is itself continually changing. Recognizing this is one thing.
Deciding what to do about it – in terms of our thinking, or action – is another.
Example topics: ecological succession (equivalent in economics?), metapopulation / metacommunity
ecology, coexistence, extinction debt, post-glacial effects // evolution of market crises, efficient
markets, bank runs, centralization vs decentralization, feedback loops
Natural Capital Initiative session
TBC
Managing Complex Oecosystems
Oooh, now the tricky part. How can we use economic and ecological thinking, either traditional or
that gained from eco^2, to improve our management of real economies, real ecosystems? And can
we use it to create a more ‘joined up’ approach, whereby economies are managed with the
sustainability of ecosystems in mind, and ecosystems are managed in way that makes active use of
economic ideas or economic instruments?
Example topics: tax, regulation, monetarist vs Keynesian, Laissez Faire, exchange rates, Bank of
England // conservation, biological control, reserve design, fisheries policy, species vs ecosystem
approaches // ecological / green economics