Weinstein Trading Room
The business room at the Hebrew University Business School opened in 2002 with a donation from Shirley and George Weinstein and with the support of the Kruger Center. The room is mainly used for a unique Investment Fund Management course taught by Prof. Zvi Wiener of the Hebrew University Business School.
The course opened in 1999, and since then, every year, after a rigorous application process, a group of ~15 students is admitted thereto. The students receive an actual global financial investment portfolio worth millions of shekels, invested in securities traded on major stock exchanges around the world. The class is divided into professional teams with each team having its own role, such as a risk management team, a macro team, a bond team, or a stock team, and together they manage the portfolio and try to get it yield a return relative to the market portfolio.
In addition, the trading room serves as a hub for a variety of areas, including:
- World markets
- Macroeconomic developments
- Main indices on stock exchanges
- Data on the stock market in Israel and abroad
- Government and corporate bonds
- Derivative financial instruments
The trading room is a bridge between theoretical study and real-world experience in finance, and gives students practical tools in the field of investment and money management.
Behavioral Lab
The Behavioral Lab is actively involved in the research of human behavior. Faculty members, research students, and teaching assistants in the Business School all play an integral role therein. The members of the lab team work towards discovering new insights regarding the fascinating processes that underlie human behavior. The lab focuses on many areas of behavior, including interpersonal differences in the execution of tasks, processes and cognitive biases, impact of listening on human functioning and well-being, and the way personality and situation together shape attitudes and behaviors.
Behavioral Lab Researchers: Prof. Lilach Sagiv, Prof. Shaul Oreg, Prof. Avi Kluger.
Decision-Making Lab
Headed by Dr. Shoham Choshen-Hillel, the laboratory conducts research on the decision-making process, combining theory and methodology from social psychology and behavioral economics, toward better understanding of individual and group decision making in a social context. For example, in one experiment, the lab is studying how people divide money amongst themselves versus how they divide money amongst others. Insights regarding charity, helping and passing on information to others, and more, can all be extrapolated from these experiments. The research results have important implications for a wide range of fields, including organizational behavior, management, psychology, public policy, behavioral economics, and law.
Future of Work Lab
The laboratory, headed by Dr. Sharon Arieli, focuses on developing skills required for the contemporary world of employment, including creativity, problem solving, and innovation.
The laboratory’s research is interdisciplinary, and combines theories and methodologies from social psychology, organizational psychology, organizational behavior and strategy, in order to enhance our understanding of how to develop creativity and innovation at work, and how to increase employees’ sense of meaning.
The studies examine environmental and personality factors that influence our behavior at work and how we think; and the results of the research have important implications for employees and organizations. For example:
- How does the culture in which we grew up affect how we think and act?
- Does exposure to foreign cultures affect how we handle complex tasks?
- How can we help people to think more flexibly and creatively, and address problems innovatively?
Economics and Decision Making Lab
The laboratory, headed by Prof. Anat Bracha, is designed for experimental research in economics, which includes experiments testing individual decision-making toward understanding consumers’, investors’, and firms’ behavior; as well as experiments that test the characteristics of common economic theories; and marketing experiments.