- Tuesday 28 – Wednesday 29 April 2026
- Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4SE, UK
The Local Organising Committee is pleased to announce the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre Research Symposium 2026, which will be held in person at Newcastle University Business School on Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 April 2026. The Symposium provides a forum for researchers to present their latest research on the economics of cultural and creative industries.
The Symposium will host two keynotes from Professor Pierluigi Sacco and Professor Joanna Woronkowicz, as well as a high-level policy panel.
Keynotes
Beyond Nudge: The Arts as a Behavioral Policy Paradigm
Professor Pier Luigi Sacco, Professor of Biobehavioral Economics, Department of Neuroscience and BACH Center, University of Chieti-Pescara
What if the most effective behavioral policy tool we have is not a nudge, but a novel?
Over the past two decades, behavioral economics has established itself as the dominant framework for evidence-based policy design. Choice architecture, default settings, and framing effects have reshaped how governments think about regulation, public health, and welfare. Yet the empirical record of nudge interventions increasingly reveals a pattern of small effect sizes, poor durability, and limited generalisability: effects that decay once the contextual prompt is removed, that rarely transfer across domains, and that leave underlying cognitive and motivational structures untouched.
This keynote argues that this pattern is not accidental but structural. The talk concludes by examining what this paradigm shift means for creative industries policy and for the evidence base that supports it.
Artists at Work with AI: Evidence on Creative Labor and Technology Adoption
Professor Joanna Woronkowicz, Faculty Director, Center for Cultural Affairs, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
What does it mean to be an artist at work in the age of generative AI?
This keynote extends the central argument of Artists at Work—that artists are workers operating within distinctive labor-market conditions—into the context of AI-mediated creative production.
The talk reframes generative AI adoption as a labor-market outcome rather than primarily an attitudinal or ethical one. Drawing on new empirical evidence from a national survey of approximately 2,500 arts alumni from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), it examines how AI use varies across creative workers and work contexts.
The final part of the talk examines how these dynamics intersect with current policy discussions on AI and cultural production. Focusing on the concept of “creator agency under AI,” it considers how issues of transparency, consent, compensation, and attribution are being framed in emerging policy agendas.
Creative PEC is led by Newcastle University Business School with the RSA.
