Conference in Honor of Ernst Fehr

What does it take to change how an entire discipline thinks about human behavior? Ernst Fehr has spent five decades answering that question ­­– and on June 19–20, 2026, some of the world’s most eminent economists are gathering at the University of Zurich to reflect on the answers he has found.
 
The two-day academic conference in Fehr's honor brings together leading researchers from institutions including Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and the Toulouse School of Economics, among them Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee, Joel Mokyr, Oliver Hart, and Jean Tirole. Their presentations span a remarkably wide terrain: from the cultural roots of markets and the social preferences that shape them to climate justice and inequality of opportunity.
 
Yet the diversity of topics tells a coherent story. Each session, in its own way, traces a line back to Fehr’s foundational insight: that people are not purely self-interested, and that this matters – for how markets function, how organizations are led, how contracts are written, and how societies address the great challenges of our time.
 
What are the big open questions? Where does the field go from here? A closing panel discussion featuring Leo Bursztyn, Colin Camerer, Roberto A. Weber, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya takes up precisely these questions.
 
We will be sharing individual talks and highlights from the conference on this page in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.