Alessandra Casella: Experimentation and Voting Theory
She studies new voting systems, including the one dealt with in her book Storable Votes. Protecting the Minority Voice, which analyzes the possibility of making decisions based on the intensity of voter preferences, and not on the majority of votes. Alessandra Casella received a degree in Economic and Social Sciences in 1983 from Bocconi, got her PhD from MIT, and was Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley until 1993. "After six years at the University of California I still hadn't gotten tenure, so the whole experience was rather irritating. I spoke with Tom Sargent about it, who had also had to deal with the same kind of situation. He encouraged me to think of the situation as an opportunity. So that's what I did. Instead of waiting for another tenure offer, I decided to accept a position that was temporary but in the city I wanted to be in: New York. I contacted Colombia University and made an agreement with them that I would be promoted after two years - a request which they did indeed satisfy".
During her academic career Alessandra Casella dealt with monetary economics. This led her - during the Maastricht Treaty years - to explore the European monetary union and look at the issues around organizing a central bank which groups many different countries together. "Moving from international macroeconomics to public economics and voting theory, I discovered new proposals regarding how decisions are made in the electoral field, but at the time there was no data. I spoke with several experimental researchers who suggested that I start by simulating the problem in order to see how individuals react: this is how I discovered research work in the lab and developed a passion for experimental economics. This approach is also very stimulating because you are the person generating the data that's needed to support your theory". Today, Alessandra Casella is a Professor of Economics and Political Science at Columbia University, and is a member of both the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research in London.
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