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BEAR Research Fellows

BEAR > About Us > Research Fellows

Our Research Fellows bring their unique expertise to BEAR’s knowledge creation and knowledge mobilization activities. Their backgrounds range from economics, marketing, psychology, organizational behaviour, political science and strategic management.

Ashton Anderson

Ashton Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he is also a Research Lead for the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a Faculty Affiliate with the Vector Institute. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2015 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Microsoft Research NYC in 2017. His research in computational social science encompasses a diverse range of questions at the intersection of AI, data, and society. His work has appeared in venues including Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Judgment and Decision Making. He received the 2022 CS-Canada Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award and won the 2012–2015 Google PhD Fellowship in Social Computing. 

Keywords: Computational Social Science, Large-scale Empirical Studies, Decision Making, Online Behavioural Traces

Recent Publications:

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Rhia Catapano

Rhia Catapano is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Rotman.In one research stream, she studies how people can be shifted away from entrenched views, and factors that affect receptiveness to the opposition. In another research stream, she explores the role of meaning in consumer satisfaction and decision-making. Her research has been published in leading academic journals including Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Marketing Research, and she serves on the Editorial Review Board of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She received her PhD in Marketing from Stanford University. 

Keywords: Political polarization, Well-being

Recent Publications:

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Claire Celerier

Claire Célérier is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Rotman. Claire's research interests include household finance, financial innovation, and banking. Recent projects investigate how banks can use innovative security designs to cater to household behavioral biases and affect household portfolio choice. Her work has been published in refereed academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has raised the interest of several central banks and regulators around the world, such as the FDIC, the IMF, European Central Bank and the UK Financial Conduct Authority.

Keywords: Household Finance, Financial Innovation, Financial Participation, Portfolio Choice

Recent Publications:

Yuna Choe

Yuna Choe is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the G. Brint Ryan College of Business, University of North Texas. Her primary research area investigates the factors and interventions that influence consumers' financial and spending decisions and understanding psychological factors that explain consumer behavior, using a variety of methods, including lab experiments, large-scale surveys, and field experiments. She has published articles on the effects of mental budgeting on consumer spending and focuses on providing practical and helpful suggestions for consumer financial well-being using the tools of experimental psychology and behavioral economics.

Keywords: Consumer financial decisions and well-being, Mental budgeting, Judgment and decision making

 

Recent Publications:

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Katy DeCelles

Katherine DeCelles

Katherine (Katy) DeCelles is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Academic Director of PhD Program at Rotman, and cross-appointed to the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She also holds the Secretary of State Professorship in Organizational Effectiveness. Katy’s research is on understanding the micro-mechanisms involved in conflict, emotion, morality, inequality, aggression, crime, and criminal justice organizations. Her research has been highlighted in outlets such as the Smithsonian Magazine, Science Magazine, BBC, CNN, and The New York Times. Her research has received awards from the Academy of Management and American Sociological Association, and she has been recognized for her MBA teaching by Poets & Quants (2018). Katy served as an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Journal from 2016-2019 and as the Deputy Editor (Micro) for the Academy of Management Journal from 2019-2021.

 

Keywords: Justice, Ethics, Emotion, Aggression, Antisocial behaviour, Diversity, Inequality, Crime

Laura Doering

Laura Doering is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management with a cross-appointment in the Department of Sociology. As an economic sociologist, she examines how interactions and social psychological processes shape outcomes for households, organizations, and markets. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociology of Development, and Journal of Business Venturing. Professor Doering’s research and writing have appeared in The New York Times, BBC News, The Globe and Mail, and Salon.

Keywords: Economic Sociology, Poverty, Finance, Micro-entrepreneurship, Gender

Recent Publications:

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Kristen Duke

Kristen Duke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Rotman. She studies consumer decision-making, including: how the timing of decisions versus their enactment affects emotions and behavior, how consumers mentally represent uncertainty and respond to different probability expressions, how the structure of a purchase process influences purchase likelihood, how the structure of incentives influences normative inferences and behavior, and the cognitive consequences of consumers’ reliance on technology. Her work has appeared in several academic journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has been featured in popular press outlets including Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. She earned a PhD in marketing at the University of California San Diego.

Keywords: Decision-Making, Judgment, Risk, Emotions

Recent Publications:

Website
Avi Goldfarb

Avi Goldfarb

Avi Goldfarb is the Ellison Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He teaches courses on data, marketing, and digitization. Avi’s research focuses on understanding the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy and has been funded by Google, Industry Canada, Bell Canada, AIMIA, SSHRC, and others. He has published over 60 academic articles in a variety of outlets in marketing, statistics, law, computing, and economics. Avi received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. He is Chief Data Scientist of the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, a fellow at BEAR, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Keywords: Innovation policy, Privacy, Digital markets

Recent Publications:
Julian House

Julian House

Julian House is a behavioural scientist in the Ontario government’s Behavioural Insights Unit, where he helps design, apply, and evaluate insights from the behavioural sciences to advance public policy and social welfare aims. His research appears in top academic outlets, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Behavioural Science and Policy Journal, and has also been covered by media outlets including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Globe and Mail.

Keywords: Preventative healthcare, Poverty reduction, Online behaviour

Recent Publications:

Leslie John

Leslie K. John is a behavioral scientist and Professor at the Harvard Business School. She studies how people make decisions, and the wisdom or error of those decisions. In one line of research, Dr. John studies privacy decision-making, identifying what drives people to share or withhold personal information, as well as their reactions to firms’ and employers’ use of their personal data. In another line of research, Dr. John studies health decision-making, devising psychologically-informed interventions to help people make healthier choices.

 

Her work has been published in leading academic journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Management Science, The Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. It has received media coverage in outlets including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Time Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including from the Association for Psychological Science and the Marketing Science Institute; and was named a Wired Innovation Fellow. She has worked with organizations including Facebook, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

 

Keywords: Decision-Making, Behavioural Economics, Privacy, Health

 

Recent Publications:

Website
Lisa Krame

Lisa Kramer

Lisa Kramer is Professor of Finance at the University of Toronto. She utilizes techniques from experimental social psychology, economics, and finance to analyze a wide variety of questions. For instance: How do our emotions affect financial decisions? Can insights about the human brain help explain why markets are more likely to crash during autumn than in other seasons? Which factors shape willingness to take financial risks? Her scholarly research has appeared in economics, finance, and psychology journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Social Psychological and Personality Science. She has presented research at seminars and conferences around the world, and she has written op/ed pieces for the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal and the Globe and Mail. Professor Kramer routinely delivers keynote speeches – to expert professional audiences and to the general public alike – on myriad topics under the broad umbrella of behavioural finance. She has served her profession as an elected director of the Northern Finance Association, she acts as an advisor to various industry groups, and she routinely provides pro bono services to various social justice causes, especially in the area of animal rights.

Keywords: Behavioural Finance, Financial Markets, Investor Decisions, Wealth Management, Emotions, Risk Aversion, Financial Literacy, Neuroeconomics

Recent Publications:

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Chang-Yuan Lee

Chang-Yuan Lee is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Rotman. Chang-Yuan's research focuses on consumer financial decision making, informing theories and practices in the marketing areas including behavioural pricing and mental accounting. His work has appeared in Psychological Science.

Keywords: Judgment and decision-making, behavioural pricing

Recent Publications:
 

Nina Mažar 

Nina Mažar is Professor of Marketing at Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Nina was the 2019 president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and has been named one of "The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (2014). With her focus on behavioral science she examines ways to help individuals and organizations make better decisions and increase societal welfare. Popular accounts of her work have appeared among others on NPR, BBC, Wired, and various NYTimes Bestsellers. Nina is the co-founder of BEworks, a former co-director of University of Toronto’s BEAR center, and former inaugural Senior Behavioral Scientist of the World Bank’s behavioral insights team (eMBeD) in Washington, DC. She has served as advisor on boards of various government (Austrian Minister for Families and Youth) and organizations (e.g., Irrational Labs in San Francisco, CA). She holds a Dr. rer. pol. in Marketing from the University of Mainz in Germany.

 

Keywords: Behavioural Science, Decision Making, Field Experiments, Ethics, Social Impact

 

Recent Publications:
 

Katherine Milkman

Katy Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, host of Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast Choiceology, and the former president of the international Society for Judgment and Decision Making. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a research center with the mission of advancing the science of lasting behavior change. Over the course of her career, Katy has worked with or advised dozens of organizations on how to spur positive change, including the White House, Google, the U.S. Department of Defense, the American Red Cross, 24 Hour Fitness, and Walmart. An award-winning scholar and teacher, Katy writes frequently about behavioral science for major media outlets such asThe Washington Post,The New York Times, andThe Economist. Her bestselling book How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Bewas named one of the eight best books for healthy living in 2021 by theNew York Times, and Katy was also named one the world’s top 50 Management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2021. Katy earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University (summa cum laude), where she studied Operations Research and American Studies, and her PhD from Harvard University where she studied Computer Science and Business.

Keywords: Behavioural Economics, Health, Decision Making, Diversity, Field Experiments

Recent Publications:

Website
OreopulosP

Philip Oreopoulos

Philip Oreopoulos is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, at Berkeley and his M.A. from the University of British Columbia. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research. He has held a previous visiting appointment at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is editor at the Journal of Labor Economics. Dr. Oreopoulos’ current work focuses on education policy, especially the application of behavioural economics to education and child development. He often examines this field by initiating and implementing large-scale field experiments, with the goal of producing convincing evidence for public policy decisions.

Keywords: Labor Economics, Applied Econometrics, Economics of Education

Recent Publications:

Avni Shah

Avni Shah is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment to the Marketing area at the Rotman School of Management. Using field and laboratory data, Avni investigates how payment influences consumer decision-making and consumer well-being particularly in financial and health contexts. Her research has covered a broad range of topics such as looking at how paying with different forms of payment influence purchase behaviour and how paying a surcharge on unhealthy food items influences unhealthy food consumption. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Psychological Science. Avni pursued her doctorate in Marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and earned her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, double majoring in Psychological and Brain Sciences and Religion. Prior to beginning her career in academia, Avni worked as a research assistant at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Centre, and was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to graduate school, Avni also found some time to fulfill a life goal of having a somewhat successful DJing business under the alias, DJ Lunchbox.

Keywords: Payment system, Decision making

Recent Publications:
 

Rajiv Vaidyanathan

Rajiv Vaidyanathan (Ph.D. Washington State University) is Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He has several years of teaching, consulting and research experience.  Previously Rajiv was Vice President of Marketing at Active Learning Technologies where he was responsible for developing and implementing marketing strategy for a series of e-learning products.  Since 2005, Rajiv has served as executive director of the Association for Consumer Research, the largest scholarly organization of consumer researchers in the world. He also serves on the steering committee for the Applied Behavioral Science Association. Dr. Vaidyanathan has won awards for his teaching, research, and service at the University of Minnesota.

His research interests include the examination of how consumers use information for decision-making and how they process price and brand information. His research has been published in several journals, including the Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Product and Brand Management, and in the proceedings of several national and international marketing conferences.

Keywords: Decision Making, Persuasion, Behavioral Pricing

Recent Publications:
 

 

Nicole Wu 

Nicole Wu is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how individuals and labour groups respond to employment threats from technological change and automation. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and obtained a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

Keywords: Public opinion, labour politics, technological change 

Recent Publications:

Website

Min Zhao

Min Zhao is Associate Professor of Marketing at Rotman. Her primary research focuses on decision over time that pertains to consumers’ saving, waiting, product preferences and the related mindsets. She is also interested in consumer’s affective experiences and new product adoption. Min has published in leading marketing and psychological journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Psychological Science. Her research findings are featured in major media including the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. Min has been identified as authors with top research productivity in the premier AMA (American Marketing Association) journals and Marketing Journals in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. She was also named Marketing Science Institute “Young Scholar” in 2013, an award given to the most promising scholars in marketing and closely related fields. Min currently serves at the Editorial Review Board of Journal of Consumer Research.

Keywords: Consumer decision making, New product adoption

Recent Publications: