Rate My Professor Shaun Hargreaves

Professor Shaun Hargreaves Heap is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, within the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford and his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining King’s College London in 2013, he taught in the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia. He has held visiting positions at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Sydney.

His research specializations are experimental economics and behavioural economics. Current laboratory experiments examine social influences on individual decision-making, including the role of group membership and peer effects. He also investigates the application of Mill's Harm Principle to welfare economics and its contributions to behavioural public policy. His expertise relates to UN Sustainable Development Goals such as SDG 1 No Poverty, SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities, and SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. He has led projects including the Behavioral Crisis project (2015-2018), the Workshop on Behavioural Political Economy (2014), and the ESRC-funded Network for Integrated Behavioural Science (2013-2016).

Key publications include ‘Mill’s Harm Principle, Rationality and Pareto Optimality in Games’ (with M. Ismail; Synthese, 2025), ‘Walter Lippmann: an institutionalist for our times’ (with P. Lewis; Journal of Institutional Economics, 2024), ‘How does group identification affect redistribution in representative democracies’ (with E. Manifold, K. Matakos, D. Xefteris; Journal of Public Economics, 2022), ‘Vote and Voice: An experiment on the effects of inclusive governance rules’ (with K. Tsutsui, D. Zizzo; Social Choice and Welfare, 2020), ‘Preference conformism: an experiment’ (with E. Fatas, D. Rojo Arjona; European Economic Review, 2018), ‘Social information nudges: an experiment with multiple group references’ (with A. Ramalingam, D. Rojo Arjona; Southern Economic Journal, 2017), ‘The Political Influence of Peer Groups: Experimental Evidence in the Classroom’ (with C. Campos, F. Lopez de Leon; Oxford Economic Papers, 2017), ‘How portable is level-0 behavior? A test of Level-k theory in games with non-neutral frames’ (with D. Rojo Arjona, R. Sugden; Econometrica, 2014), and ‘The value of groups’ (with D. Zizzo; American Economic Review, 2009). He co-authored Game Theory: A Critical Text (with Y. Varoufakis; 1992, revised 2004).