Aric Shafran

Professor

Contact Information

Email: ashafran@calpoly.edu
Phone: 805-756-2955

Dr. Shafran’s research spans several areas of economics, including environmental economics, experimental economics, and decision making under risk and uncertainty.  He is affiliated with the WUI Fire Institute at Cal Poly and has several ongoing projects related to the economics of wildfire risk.   He was also instrumental in starting up an experimental economics lab at Cal Poly and is actively involved in running and conducting experiments at Cal Poly.  Recent experimental work includes a field experiment on piece-rate productivity and lab experiments on all-pay auctions and on self-protection against risk.

Shafran’s research has been published in respected journals such as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Journal of Urban Economics. He was named a Fellow in the “Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disaster Researchers” program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. His work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, CAL FIRE, the California Air Resources Board, the NSF National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, and the U.S. Department of Defense.  He has presented his research at numerous conferences and university seminars.

Shafran holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Master of Engineering and B.S. in computer science (magna cum laude) from Cornell University. He received the Graduate Award for Public Policy Research and the Reuben A. Zubrow Award for Economics Research while at the University of Colorado. He has taught Environmental Economics, Urban Economics, the Economics of Land and Water, Computing and Machine Learning for Economics, Managerial Economics, Math Tools for Economists, and Principles of Microeconomics.