Lasha Lanchava, a research fellow at ISET Policy Institute, published a new paper titled “No Evidence of Association between Toxoplasma Gondii Infection and Financial Risk-Taking in Females” in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. He co-authored a paper with Mr. Nave and Mr. Carlson – researchers from California Institute of Technology, Ms. Šebánková, and Jaroslav Flegr – of Charles University, and a leading scholar of adverse influences of Toxoplasma Gondii infection on human personality and behavior.

Malkhaz Shashiashvili, professor of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU) visited ISET on Thursday, September 17th to present his recent paper "Discrete-Time Hedging of the American Option" co-authored with S. Hussain, professor of Government College University. Since his talk contained very complicated mathematical methods, Prof. Shashiashvili started the presentation by giving definitions and keywords, in order to make it accessible for a general audience.

On Friday, May 29th, Jan Fidrmuc from Brunel University presented his recent research paper titled “Happiness and Religion” coauthored with Çiğdem Börke Tunalı from Istanbul University to the ISET Community. This was not Mr. Fridrmuc’s first visit to ISET, he has already presented very interesting works about Friday the 13th superstition and persistence of social capital.

ISET is proud to announce that on Wednesday, May 28th, 2015 Lasha Labadze, Deputy Director of ISET Policy Institute, defended his Ph.D. thesis at Tbilisi State University, Faculty of Economics and Business. Lasha Labadze is the first ISET alumna who graduated from the TSU Ph.D. program in economics. His paper titled “Modeling effects of an investment in Georgian Agricultural Sector” was supervised by TSU Professor Eteri Kharaishvili, Head of Microeconomics Department.

On Monday, May 18th, ISET hosted Mr. Jan Klingelhöfer from RWTH Aachen University who presented his paper titled “The Swing Voters' Blessing" to the ISET community. The paper deals with the following question: can democracy work well if the electorate is neither fully informed nor fully rational?