Professor Don Ross

Professor Don Ross is an economist and philosopher of science who works in experimental economics, economics of road infrastructure in Africa, applications of game theory to the study of sociality, and the unifying foundations of the behavioural and social sciences.

His current research focuses primarily on laboratory studies of risky behaviour, especially as related to confidence and gender; on methods of economic and econometric estimates of risk and time preferences; and on game-theoretic models of the origins of hyper-sociality in intelligent animals in addition to humans. He is currently co-PI on a multi-year project to estimate the risk preferences of a group of elephants in Limpopo Province.

He has been a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town since 2000; the program director for Methodology at the Centre for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University since 2011; and a professor and Head of the School of Society, Politics, and Ethics at University College Cork, Ireland since late 2016.

Prof Ross is the deputy editor of the journal Cognitive Processing, and serves on three journal editorial boards. He has recently conducted major consulting exercises on South Africa’s rural road maintenance for the World Bank and the South African National Roads Agency.

He has supervised 22 PhD and Master’s students to completion.

His research outputs over the last eight years include a book, The Gambling Animal (with Glenn Harrison), two edited books, 22 peer-reviewed journal articles and seven book chapters.