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Ashton Anderson
Ashton Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He analyzes large datasets of online behaviour, bringing a computational perspective to questions about decision making, community dynamics, and systemic bias. Throughout his career he has collaborated with many companies, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and his work has appeared in several high-profile journals and conferences, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, and The Web Conference. Before joining the University of Toronto, he completed his PhD at Stanford and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research NYC.
Keywords: Computational Social Science, Large-scale Empirical Studies, Decision Making, Online Behavioural Traces
Recent Publications:
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Anderson, A., Kleinberg, J., & Mullainathan, S. (2017). Assessing human error against a benchmark of perfection. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), Special Issue on Best Papers of KDD 2016.
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Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J. and Leskovec, J. (2013). Steering user behavior with badges. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 95-106).
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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:
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Katherine DeCelles
Katherine (Katy) DeCelles is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Rotman, and cross-appointed to the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Toronto. Katy’s research focuses on the intersection of organizational behaviour and criminology. She focuses on understanding the micro-mechanisms involved in topics such as prison work, power and selfishness, activism and aggression.
Keywords: Justice, Ethics, Emotion, Aggression, Antisocial behaviour, Diversity, Inequality, Crime
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Elizabeth Dhuey
Elizabeth Dhuey is an associate professor of economics at the University of Toronto. She holds appointments at the Department of Management and the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources. She is also affiliated with the School of Public Policy and Governance and holds a cross-appointment to the Department of Economics. Elizabeth received her B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1999. She received her M.A (2002) and PhD (2007) in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth’s research focuses on the economics of education and in particular, the early years of children’s development. She has written articles on the effect of age at school entry on later academic and labor market outcomes. In addition, she has researched the effect of fiscal incentives in state funding formulas on special education identification and placements and the effects of school principals on student achievement. Her current research focuses on programs and interventions and their effects on early child development. Her research has been published in top economics and education journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Education Finance and Policy, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Economics of Education Review. It also has been cited by the popular press, including The New York Times, in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and on 60 Minutes.
Keywords: Education, Child development, Childcare, Disabilities
Recent Publications:
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Laura Doering
Laura Doering is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management. She examines how micro-level decisions, relationships, and circumstances affect economic outcomes in developing countries. Substantively, she focuses on entrepreneurship and financial access in low-income areas. To realize this research, Professor Doering collaborates with private banks, government ministries, and non-profit organizations. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Sociology of Development. In the mainstream press, Professor Doering’s research has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, BBC News, CBS News, Salon, and other outlets. She earned a joint PhD in sociology and business administration from the University of Chicago, and is a faculty affiliate in the Latin American Studies department.
Keywords: Economic Sociology, Poverty, Finance, Micro-entrepreneurship, Gender
Recent Publications:
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Doering, L. (forthcoming). Risk, Returns and Relational Lending: Personal Ties in Microfinance. American Journal of Sociology.
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Doering, L. (2016). Necessity Is the Mother of Isomorphism. Sociology of Development, 2(3), 235-264.
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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:
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Jacob Hirsh
Jacob Hirsh is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at the University of Toronto's Institute for Management & Innovation and the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management. His research explores the cognitive and affective dynamics underlying personality, motivation, and decision-making. Dr. Hirsh has published his work in a variety of outlets including Academy of Management Review, Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Keywords: Personality, Motivation, Decision-Making
Recent Publications:
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Hirsh, J. B. & Kang, S. K. (2016). Mechanisms of Identity Conflict: Uncertainty, Anxiety, and the Behavioral Inhibition System. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 223-244.
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Hirsh, J. B., Kang, S. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2012). Personalized persuasion: Tailoring persuasive appeals to recipient personality traits. Psychological Science, 23(6), 578-581.
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Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J. B. (2012). Psychological entropy: a framework for understanding uncertainty-related anxiety. Psychological Review, 119(2), 304-320.
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Mitchell Hoffman
Professor Mitchell Hoffman specializes in labor economics, behavioural economics, organizational economics, productivity, and strategy. Recent projects have included (1) how contracts used in providing firm-sponsored general training interact with workers’ overoptimistic beliefs about their productivity and (2) an analysis of employee job referral networks. Hoffman has worked on research with companies in a number of different industries including trucking, high-tech, consumer goods, and call-centres on projects using large firm datasets and/or randomized experiments. He actively seeks out new partnerships and collaborations with organizations. Hoffman’s research has been widely featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Atlantic, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation.
Keywords: People analytics, Human capital, Human resources, Social networks, A-B tests, Big data, Reputation, Leadership, Customer analytics.
Recent Publications: See Mitchell’s website
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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:
- Castelo, N., Hardy, E., House, J., Mazar, N., Tsai, C., & Zhao, M. (2015). Moving Ontarians online: Using salience & message framing to motivate behaviour change. Behavioural Science & Policy, 1(2).
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Michael Inzlicht
Michael Inzlicht is a Professor of Psychology, cross-appointed as a Professor at the Rotman School of Management, and a Research Fellow at the Behavioural Economics in Action (BEAR) group, all at the University of Toronto. Michael conducts research that sits at the boundaries of social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Although he has published papers on the topics of prejudice, academic performance, and religion, his most recent interests have been in the topics of self-control and self-regulation, where he borrows methods from affective and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying nature of self-control, including how it is driven by motivation. Michael completed his B.Sc. in Anatomical Sciences at McGill University in 1994, his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Brown University in 2001, and his postdoctoral fellowship in Applied Psychology at New York University in 2004. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and edited two books. His work has been featured in media outlets around the world, including The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, BBC News, TIME, The Daily Telegraph, and the CBC, among many others. His research and teaching have been recognized with the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, the SPSSI Louise Kidder Early Career Award, the Ontario government’s Early Researcher Award, the ISCON Best Social Cognition Paper Award, the Principal’s Research Award, and the UofT Scarborough Professor of the Year Award. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Keywords: Productivity, Self-Control, Academic Achievement, Diversity
Recent Publications:
- Inzlicht, M., Legault, L., & Teper, R. (2014). Exploring the Mechanisms of Self-Control Improvement. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 302-307.
- Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014). Why Self-Control Seems (But May Not Be) Limited. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 127-133.
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Leslie John
Leslie K. John is a Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration 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’ 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.
Keywords: Decision-Making, Behavioural Economics, Privacy, Health
Recent Publications:
- John, L. K. (September-October 2018). Uninformed Consent. Special Issue on The Big Idea: Tracked. Harvard Business Review (website).
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Kim, T., Barasz,K., & John. L. K. (forthcoming). Why Am I Seeing this Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness. Journal of Consumer Research.
- Donnelly, G., Zatz, L. Y., Svirsky, D., & John, L.K. (August 2018). The Effect of Graphic Warnings on Sugary-Drink Purchasing. Psychological Science, 29 (8): 1321–1333.
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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:
- Kramer, L., Kamstra, M., Levi, M., & Wermers, R. (forthcoming). Seasonal Asset Allocation: Evidence from Mutual Fund Flows, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
- Kramer, L., Kamstra, M., & Levi, M. (2015). Seasonal Variation in Treasury Returns, Critical Finance Review, 4(1), 45-115.
- Kramer, L., & Weber, J. M. (2012). This is Your Portfolio on Winter: Seasonal Affective Disorder and Risk Aversion in Financial Decision Making, Social Psychological and Personality Science 3(2), 193-199.
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Peter Loewen
Peter Loewen is the Director of the School of Public Policy and Governance and an Associate Professor of Political Science. He has three broad research interests. First, why do citizens prefer some policies and political parties and not others? Why do they prefer some people and not others? This work involves field experiments, behavioural experiments, and survey research. He has collected original data in the Anglo-American democracies, Sweden, Mongolia, and Malawi. Second, how do politicians make decisions? This work involves field experiments and behavioural experiments with thousands of politicians in Canada, Belgium, Israel, and the United States. Third, he is interested in the methods of experimentation and applied statistics. Peter’s work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Transactions of the Royal Society B, American Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others. He regularly consults with governments and private organizations on opinion formation and communication. Peter received his PhD from the Université de Montréal, and completed postdocs with Paul Quirk(UBC) and James Fowler (University of California, San Diego).
Keywords: Political psychology and behaviour, especially in Anglo-American democracies, Behavioural economics, Public opinion, Genopolitics, and Experimentation
Recent Publications:
- Dawes, C.T., Loewen, P.J. and Fowler, J,H. “Social Preferences and Political Participation.” Journal of Politics. 73:845-856.
- Dawes, C. T., Settle, J.E., Loewen, P.J., McGue, M., and Iacono, W.G. "Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 1683:2010-2015.
- Loewen, P. J., Sheffer, L., & Hinton, K. (2015). “Beauty Contests and Strategic Inference: A Behavioural Foundation for Strategic Voting.” Electoral Studies. 38:38-45.
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Kim Ly
Kim Ly has co-authored several whitepaper reports, including BEAR’s key publication “A Practitioner’s Guide to Nudging”, which is widely used by managers, practitioners, and universities to systematically develop behavioural interventions. After being introduced to the field of behavioural economics during her MBA, she developed an interest in understanding how behavioural economics could be more widely applied to business and policy issues. She is particularly interested in understanding how behavioural economics can be applied to new product development, financial decision making, and its intersection with new and emerging technologies. Prior to BEAR, she worked in the semiconductor industry as a software engineer and has also worked in the startup space. She also has a BASc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from the Rotman School of Management.
Recent Publications:
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Ly, K. ,Sati, S., & Singer, E. (2017). "A Behavioural Lens on Transportation Systems: The Psychology of Commuter Behaviour and Transportation Choices." BEAR: Rotman School of Management.
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Ly, K., Mazar, N., Zhao, M., & Soman, D. (2013). "A Practitioner's Guide to Nudging." BEAR: Rotman School of Management.
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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:
- Oreopoulos, P., Wachter, T.V.,, & Heisz, A. (2012). The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 4(1): 1 – 29.
- Joshua, A., Lang D., & Oreopoulos, P. (2009). Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(1): 136-163.
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Donald Redelmeier
Dr. Redelmeier received his MD degree from University of Toronto, completed postgraduate training in Internal Medicine at Stanford University, and obtained a Masters degree in Health Services Research as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Stanford University. His research spans a variety of areas, emphasizing the psychology of decision making and the epidemiology of motor vehicle trauma. Dr. Redelmeier has published over 200 articles in the scientific medical literature. Some of his notable discoveries include “Association between cellular-telephone calls and motor vehicle collisions” (NEJM, 1997), “Driving fatalities on Super Bowl Sunday” (NEJM, 2003), and “Physician warnings for unfit drivers and the risk of trauma from a road crash” (NEJM, 2012). Dr. Redelmeier serves as the Canada Research Chair in Medical Decision Sciences; Professor at the University of Toronto; Director of Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre; Staff Physician in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (Canada’s largest trauma hospital); and a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Studies in Ontario.
Keywords: Motor vehicle crashes, Medical decision making
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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 my 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:
- Shah, A. M., Bettman, J.R., Ubel, P.A., Keller., P.A., & Edell, J.A. (2014). “Surcharges Plus Unhealthy Labels Reduce Demand for Unhealthy Menu Items” Journal of Marketing Research 51 (December), 773-789.
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Claire Tsai
Claire Tsai is an Associate Professor of Marketing and a co-founder of the Behavioural Economics in Action Research Cluster at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She has worked in financial services in New York, Taipei and Hong Kong. She adopts a behavioural economics approach in studying decision making in areas of financial decisions, food consumption and well-being. She studies overconfidence and how this bias systematically influences judgments and decision making. She also studies the science and economics of happiness, which she terms Hedonomics. Her work appears in leading marketing and psychology journals, including Journal of Consumer Research and Psychological Science. Her work often receives featured coverage in popular media outlets including the Wall Street Journal (Week in Ideas), Time.com, Globe and Mail, CBC News, and Harvard Business Review. Speaking engagements include the Latin American Financial Education Congress and Ontario Securities Commission.
Keywords: Decision making, Financial decisions, Food consumption and Wellbeing
Recent Publications:
- Tsai, C. I., & Lee., L. (2015). “The Effects of Price Promotions on Customer Satisfaction over Time.” Editorial Report Series, AIMIA Institute.
- Castelo, N., Hardy, E., House, J., Mazar, N., Tsai, C., & Zhao, M. (2015). Moving Ontarians online: Using salience & message framing to motivate behaviour change.Behavioural Science & Policy, 1(2).
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Joseph Wong
Joseph Wong is the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs, Professor of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in Health, Democracy and Development. He was the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School from 2005 to 2014. Wong is the author of many academic articles and several books, including Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics In Taiwan and South Korea and Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State, both published by Cornell University Press. He is the co-editor, with Edward Friedman, of Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, published by Routledge, and Wong recently co-edited with Dilip Soman and Janice Stein Innovating for the Global South with the University of Toronto Press. Wong’s articles have appeared in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Society, Governance, among many others.
Keywords: Poverty and Innovation
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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:
- Aggarwal, P., & Zhao, M. (2015). Seeing the Big Picture: The Effect of Height on the Level of Construal. Journal of Marketing Research.
- Castelo, N., Hardy, E., House, J., Mazar, N., Tsai, C., & Zhao, M. (2015). Moving Ontarians online: Using salience & message framing to motivate behaviour change.Behavioural Science & Policy, 1(2).
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Chen-Bo Zhong
Chen-Bo Zhong is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at Rotman School of Management. His research focuses on ethics, moral psychology, decision making and unconscious processes. He has published in journals such as, the Science, Psychological Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. He currently serves as the associate editor at Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes and is on the editorial board of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Keywords: Ethics, Moral psychology, Decision making and Unconscious processes
Recent Publications:
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Zachary Zhong
Zemin (Zachary) Zhong is an assistant professor of Marketing at Rotman. Zachary’s research focus on how behavioral economics interacts with markets and politics, as well as the economy of China. His recent projects study consumer inattention in online markets, consumer addiction to informational goods, and how nationalism affects persistency of brand preferences. He received his PhD (2017) in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Keywords: Behavioral industrial organization, Digital markets, China economy
Recent Publications:
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