Inaugural Lecture on Sense-Making in the Age of Information
Join us at the ESCP Berlin Campus for Professor Kai Barron’s inaugural lecture on Sense-Making in the Age of Information
We live in an age of information: knowledge that once took days to find is now at our fingertips, and AI is accelerating access at an unprecedented pace. Yet to harness this wealth of information, we must organize and simplify it, imposing structure on complexity. In doing this, we need to sort, select, and interpret data to form expectations and guide our decision-making. However, it is easy to make mistakes in each of these steps. Biases in information processing are common. In this talk, Prof. Barron will discuss empirical evidence on how people process information and the implications of the biases that arise: from financial mistakes due to motivated reasoning, to the persuasive power of narratives, to the cognitive foundations of political polarization. Understanding these biases is a first step towards inoculating ourselves against them, illuminating a path to more accurate models of the world and better decisions in business and in everyday life.
About the professor
Kai Barron is a Professor of Managerial Economics at ESCP Business School, Berlin Campus. He received his PhD in Economics from University College London, after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. He was a researcher at the WZB Berlin and the Berlin School of Economics from 2017 to 2026, with research visits to Harvard University, Sciences Po, Bocconi University, and IZA Bonn.
He is a behavioural and experimental economist whose research examines how people make sense of the world around them: how they process information to form beliefs and expectations, how narratives can be used as a persuasive tool, and how these processes influence important economic outcomes, such as mistakes in financial decision-making and discrimination in hiring.
His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Management Science, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. In 2026, he received the Young Scholar Award of the Economic Science Association, and his research is supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Location
Organiser: ESCP Business School
Berlin - Germany
MapDate
Start date: 02/12/2026
Start time: 5:30 PM
End time: 7:30 PM
