Department of Economics, NUI Galway : Dr. Ashley Piggins

Ethos and history

Ashley Piggins is a lecturer in economics at NUI, Galway. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Bristol. He holds a BA degree from Kingston University and a MPhil degree from the University of Cambridge. His taught MPhil course and his PhD research were both funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. In addition, he has a postgraduate certificate in higher education teaching from Queen's University Belfast.

Ashley started teaching economics after his MPhil degree, spending a year at the University of Nottingham. He also taught a variety of courses as a PhD student at Bristol. After spending a year as a post-doc at the Université de Caen (working under Prof. Maurice Salles), he joined Queen's University Belfast where he worked as an economics lecturer for a number of years. He joined NUI, Galway in 2005. In 2007 he taught a part of the MSc course in microeconomics at Trinity College Dublin. Although his expertise is in microeconomics, Ashley is a generalist when it comes to teaching. For example, he has taught core courses in Macroeconomics, Money and Banking and the Economics of the European Union. Ashley has been nominated for awards in recognition of the quality of his teaching.

Research interests include social choice theory, welfare economics, game theory, public choice and issues on the boundary of economics and philosophy. He is currently working on social choice with fuzzy preferences, models of complete uncertainty, proximity preservation, axiomatic approaches to deliberation and the apportionment problem. He currently has one PhD student who is funded by the IRCHSS. Ashley has also won competitive funding from the IRCHSS for his own research. Recent working papers can be downloaded from his personal website (see above).

Ashley has given seminars at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Bath, University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, Université de Caen, Universidad de Murcia, Universität Osnabrück, University of St. Andrews, University of East Anglia and NUI Galway.

In 2008, Ashley was appointed a visiting Professor of Economics at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise in Paris.

Selected Publications

Piggins, A., Duddy, C. & Perote-Peña, J. (2010). Arrow's theorem and max-star transitivity. Forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare.

Piggins, A. & Perote-Peña, J., (2002). Geometry and impossibility, Economic Theory, vol 20, pp 831-836.

Piggins, A. & Perote-Peña, J., (2005). Pareto efficiency with spatial rights. Journal of Mathematical Economics, vol 41, pp 265-283.

Piggins, A., Duddy, C. & Perote-Peña, J. (2010). Manipulating an aggregation rule under ordinally fuzzy preferences. Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 34, pp. 411-428.

Piggins, A. & Gekker, R. (2009). Evaluating opportunities when people are uncertainty averse. The Economic and Social Review, vol 40, pp 109-116.

Piggins, A. & Salles, M. (2007). Instances of indeterminacy, Analyse und Kritik, vol 29, pp 311-328.

Piggins, A. & Perote-Peña, J. Social choice, fuzzy preferences and manipulation in T. Boylan and R. Gekker (eds) Economics, Rational Choice and Normative Philosophy, Routledge: London.

Piggins, A. & Perote-Peña, J. (2009). Non-manipulable social welfare functions when preferences are fuzzy, Journal of Logic and Computation, 19, 503-515.

Piggins, A. & Perote-Peña, J, (2007). Strategy-proof fuzzy aggregation rules, Journal of Mathematical Economics, vol 43, pp 564-580.