 |
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:
-
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.
-
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).
Website
|
 |
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:
|
 |
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
|
 |
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:
-
Doering, L. (forthcoming). Risk, Returns and Relational Lending: Personal Ties in Microfinance. American Journal of Sociology.
-
Doering, L. (2016). Necessity Is the Mother of Isomorphism. Sociology of Development, 2(3), 235-264.
Website
|
 |
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:
- Lieberman, A., Duke, K. E., & Amir, O. (2019). How Incentive Framing Can Harness the Power of Social Norms. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 151, 118—31.
- Duke, K. E., & Amir, O. (2019). Guilt Dynamics: Consequences of Temporally Separating Decisions and Actions. Journal of Consumer Research, 45 (6), 1254—73.
|
 |
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:
|
 |
Dale Griffin
Dale Griffin is the Advisory Council Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Sciences and the Interim Academic Director of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business. Griffin has published widely in Marketing, Psychology, Decision Making, Strategy, and Finance journals and teaches courses in Strategic Decision Making at the MBA, PhD, and executive levels, and a course on Strategies for Responsible Business at the undergraduate level. He also consults in legal cases on consumer decision-making and risk communication. He is the editor, with Thomas Gilovich and Daniel Kahneman, of Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment and his research has received more than 20,000 citations.
His current research interests include theories and measures of risk-taking, the forecasting of time and money, and behavioural foundations of pricing. He has a BA in Psychology from UBC, and a PhD from Stanford University. He has taught at leading universities in Canada, the UK and the United States, and most recently was at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
Keywords: Prediction, Behavioural pricing, Risk measurement, Heuristics and biases
|
 |
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Website
|
 |
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
|
 |
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).
|
 |
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).
-
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.
Website
|
 |
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.
|
 |
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:
-
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.
-
Ly, K., Mazar, N., Zhao, M., & Soman, D. (2013). "A Practitioner's Guide to Nudging." BEAR: Rotman School of Management.
|
 |
Katherine Milkman
Katherine Milkman is an award-winning professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. An engineer by training, her research draws on insights from economics and psychology to change consequential health, savings, and workplace behaviors for good. Her dozens of published articles in leading social science journals have reached a wide audience through frequent coverage in major media outlets such as NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. Katherine co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work is being chronicled by Freakonomics Radio. She is also the host of Choiceology – a podcast about behavioral finance – and a regular contributor to The Washington Post, writing about the behavioral economics of everyday life.
Keywords: Behavioural Economics, Health, Decision Making, Diversity, Field Experiments
Recent Publications:
- Chang, E.H., K.L. Milkman, D. Chugh, M. Akinola (forthcoming). “Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition.” Academy of Management Journal.
- Dai, H., B. Dietvorst, B. Tuckfield, K.L. Milkman, and M.E. Schweitzer (forthcoming). “Quitting When the Going Gets Tough: A Downside of High Performance Expectations.” Academy of Management Journal.
- Chuan, A., J.B. Kessler, K.L. Milkman (2018). “Reciprocity Decays over Time, As Revealed by a Field Study of Charitable Giving.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115(8), 1766-1771.
- Benartzi, S., J. Beshears, K.L. Milkman, C. Sunstein, R.H. Thaler, M. Shankar, W. Tucker, W.J. Congdon, and S. Galing (2017). “Should Governments Invest More in Nudges?” Psychological Science, Vol. 28(8), 1041-1055.
Website
|
|
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.
|
 |
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.
|
 |
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).
|
 |
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
Recent Publications:
|
 |
Nathan Yang
Nathan Yang is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the Cornell Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor in Marketing at McGill Desautels Faculty of Management and Affiliate Professor at McGill Bensadoun School of Retail Management. His main research interests are in behavioral analytics, empirical industrial organization, (mobile) health and wellness, and retail strategy. He completed his PhD in Economics at the University of Toronto.
Keywords: Behavioral Science, Empirical Industrial Organization, Health and Wellness, Machine earning
Recent Publications:
- Yang, Nathan (2020), Learning in Retail Entry, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Articles in Advance
- Uetake, Kosuke, & Yang, Nathan (2019). Inspiration from the "Biggest Loser": Social Interactions in a Weight Loss Program, Marketing Science, Articles in Advance
- Blevins, Jason, Khwaja, Ahmed, & Yang, Nathan (2018). Firm Expansion, Size Spillovers and Market Dominance in Retail Chain Dynamics, Management Science, 64 (9), 4070-4093
- Igami, Mitsuru, & Yang, Nathan (2016). Unobserved Heterogeneity in Dynamic Games: Cannibalization and Preemptive Entry of Hamburger Chains in Canada, Quantitative Economics, 7 (2), 483-521
|
 |
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).
|
 |
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:
Website
|