Media Contact:
Carrie Conko
Director of Communications
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Office: 703-993-4899
Email: cconko@gmu.edu
Jean Ensminger
Chair, the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technologyjensming@hss.caltech.edu
Biography
Jean E. Ensminger is a professor of anthropology at the California Institute of Technology. She is an uncommon anthropologist: her line of research is known as experimental economics.
Dr. Ensminger is interested in how people make economic decisions, and her work involves running experiments—described to the participants as games—that use real money in order to learn something about real behavior. Unlike most experimental economists, however, she takes the method out of the university laboratory and into small-scale communities in Africa and elsewhere.
