Join us for an engaging talk by Vlad Tarko. This event will take place in Social Sciences Building, Room 224 from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and participate in a stimulating discussion!

Bio

Vlad Tarko is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at University of Arizona. He has done work on polycentric governance and institutional resilience, varieties of capitalism, and history of economic thought (Hayek, Buchanan, and Ostrom). His books include Understanding Capitalism (Polity Press, 2026), Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective, co-athored with Peter Boettke and Paul Aligica (Oxford, 2019), and Capitalist Alternatives, co-authored with Paul Aligica (Routledge, 2015). He has published papers in American Political Science Review, Governance, Public Choice, Journal of Institutional Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Kyklos, Business and Politics, and others.

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Abstract

Some of our most important choices in life involve large uncertainty. How are we making such choices? Choice of careers, moral commitments, and political identities, are also transformative, i.e. they involve changes of preferences. I propose that people use role models as a key heuristic to guide them across such choices. Modeling complex choices as underpinned by choices of role models helps overcome some of the issues of the standard rational choice model (too computationally taxing, and limited capacity to deal with uncertainty), and of the sociological accounts of social norms (too top-down, limited scope for individual choice, and not able to account for the diversity of moral values co-existing on the same territory). Cultural avalanches can also be better understood as driven by the availability of certain role models. The economic model developed here is inspired by the account of prestige in social psychology.