The Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation was established in 1954. Mrs. Hilma Jahnsson, the spouse of the deceased professor of economics Yrjö Jahnsson, donated a generous amount of their joint estate as initial capital for the foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to promote Finnish research in economics, medicine, and health economics, and to maintain and support Finnish educational and research facilities in these fields.
International contacts are essential to the foundation, and the Finnish economics community has benefited from lectures and seminars by a long list of internationally renowned economists. Since 1963 the foundation has arranged the Yrjö Jahnsson Lectures in Economics, one of the most distinguished scholarly lecture series in this field. The well-known Yrjö Jahnsson Award in Economics is given every two years to a young economist who has made an important contribution to economics in Europe. The foundation organizes a high-profile conference to celebrate each decennial anniversary.
This volume has its basis in an international conference held in Helsinki on June 22–23, 2004 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Foundation. As the title indicates, the aim of the conference was to discuss the role of behavioral economics in applied fields. It is important to understand how psychologically plausible features of human behavior affect—and should affect—the design and working of economic institutions. However, it is equally important to get feedback from the applied arena to see which behavioral tendencies really matter, and to see how the framework should be developed further.
I am grateful to Professor Peter Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who acted as the program chairman. He did a marvelous job in choosing the set of topics and speakers. I also thank Professor Bengt Holmström, also of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose input in the initial phase of the conference was very important. I am grateful to Professor Seppo Honkapohja, University of Cambridge, U.K., for helping us to shape the conference and this volume through his experience and connections. Finally, I thank all the speakers and commentators, and the Scientific Director of the foundation, Dr. Hannu Vartiainen, for making the conference such a successful event.