Dr Zahra Murad

I am a senior lecturer at the Economics and Finance Subject Group in the Faculty of Business and Law. I joined the University of Portsmouth in December 2017. 

 My research is on behavioural and experimental economics. I conduct laboratory, online and field experiments to study economic decision making. My research lies on the crossroads of economics, management, political science and social psychology. 

 I co-founded Portsmouth Economics Experiments Research Lab (PEER) with Wolfgang Luhan where we investigate important economic issues such as  incentives, motivation, productivity, and cooperation. 

I have completed my BSc and MSc degrees at Bilkent University in Turkey. After completing my master's degree, I moved to the UK to get my PhD at the University of Nottingham. I was a part of CeDEx, one of the first and most active behavioural research groups in the UK. My PhD title was "Experiments on Confidence Calibration and Decision Making". 

After graduating from Nottingham, I worked as a research fellow at the University of Surrey for the project "Delivering Better For Less: Improving Productivity and Motivation in Public Sector". I conducted a number of lab experiments at Surrey some of which are now published and can be found in my publications list. I taught undergraduate and postgraduate level modules at Surrey, including  Game Theory and MSc Microeconomics. 

You can see my full CV, the list of my publications, working papers and blog posts on my personal website https://sites.google.com/site/zahramuradphd/ where you can also find my frequently updates list of blogs at https://sites.google.com/site/zahramuradphd/home/blogs?authuser=0 

I teach several undergraduate modules and I am currently a module coordinator for first-year Mathematics for Economics. I also teach Public Sector Economics at the third-year undergraduate level and supervise dissertation students on the topic of "Effects of Biases and Emotions on Economic Decisions". 

I supervise two PhD students on the topics of media piracy behaviour and determinants of delays and cost overruns in the construction industry. 

I am a behavioural economist and I am interested in how biases affect people's decision making. I have worked on topics like: 

• Overconfidence
• Gender biases
• Ethnic Discrimination
• Competitive behaviour
• Behaviour in teams
• Team decision making
• Biases in belief updating
• NHS Leadership 

I am happy to take calls and emails from the media on my research, and am aware of the needs to respond to journalists in a timely manner. Please contact me directly on zahra.murad@port.ac.uk