1. My work

I’m a Max Weber Fellow (MWF) at the Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS) European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy, https://www.eui.eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/MaxWeberProgramme/People/MaxWeberFellows/Fellows-2019-2020/BATTU-Balaraju.

In recent years, say last two years, I have been reading Diego Gambetta and Jon Elster's work. These masters influenced my thinking and start looking at social sciences through a different lens than I used to see it.

At present, my research interests are mainly focused on social dilemmas focusing on the public good provision, climate change, and the evolution of institutions and social norms.

I use experimental economics/behavioral game theory and evolutionary game theory to address the problems I am interested in.

Current modeling work

a) Evolution of altruistic punishments in the population of heterogeneous conditional cooperators (finished writing).

b)Evolution of social norms in the heterogeneous population (writing stage)

c) When people wear masks (work in progress)

Previously I have finished my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the CBCS, University of Allahabad, India. Some years I worked on ‘pictorial perception’ (what is the geometry of pictorial space), at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. I studied basic game theory at Queen Mary, University of London.

I was a visiting fellow at IMSc Chennai, IIT Kanpur, NCBS Bangalore, and IISc Bangalore.

I have studied Physics and Consciousness studies (mostly philosophy of mind). Also pictorial space. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p5591?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.2&

2. Leisurely pursuits

When I’m not conducting research, I like devoting my free time to study fairness, trust, and justice. Much more fun has been reading Jan Koenderink's work on pictorial space, Visual awareness, and Attention. I am also fascinated by the nature of reality, either in quantum mechanics or in perception. I love Antonioni's and Tarkovsky's Cinema and Existentialism (Camus's writings). I love to listen to music from Ilayaraja to Bach and like to watch Kathak.

I like to do photography and I like to capture the beauty of the human body (a dream project).

In the news https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-funding-insight-2020-6-my-winning-proposal-academic-freedom-for-social-scientists/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QR3WvyIAAAAJ&hl=en

Anything interested in, you can write to me: bala(@)cbcs.ac.in