Dr Inés Moreno de Barreda

I am an Official Fellow and Tutor in Economics at St Peter’s and an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics. I joined St Peter’s in September 2014 after completing a three-year postdoc at Nuffield College. Before coming to Oxford, I finished my PhD In Economics at the London School of Economics.

Teaching

At St Peter’s, I give tutorials to first- and second-year students in microeconomics. This academic year (2019-2020), we renewed the introductory course and it is now based on CORE Economics, an international initiative to bring relevant and real-world economics to first year students. Have a look, there is a new addition on COVID-19 with video lectures that you might find interesting.

In the second-year core microeconomic course we look in more depth at the properties of markets and their failure in the presence of externalities, lack of competition or asymmetric information.

At the Department of Economics, I lecture second- and third-year undergraduate students and first year MPhil students.

Research

My research focuses on problems related to asymmetric information in economic interactions. The asymmetry of information -the fact that different agents hold different pieces of relevant information- usually creates distortions and inefficiencies in interactions. I study the agents’ incentives to reveal information; the consequences of such asymmetric information and different ways to design interactions so that full revelation of information is achieved. This work can be applied to study interactions in Political Economy, Management and Competition policies among others.

On 1 June 2020, I gave a webinar on my most recent work, Persuasion with Correlation Neglect (with Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin). The paper talks about the scope of manipulation of people’s views when information sources are correlated without readers’ awareness. Indeed, tracking information sources is far from trivial. A new study by Julia Cagé, Nicolas Hervé and Marie-Luce Viaud reports that almost two thirds of online news are not original but rather repackaged and repeated without any reference. We argue that repetition of news in this sort of environment can lead to very extreme opinions.