- Linda Babcock
- Antoine Bechara
- Daniel Gilbert
- Eric Horvitz
- Dean Karlan
- George Loewenstein
- Rosalind A. Segal
- Eldar Shafir
- Leigh Thompson
Linda Babcock
“Relational Accounts: An Answer for Women to the Compensation Negotiation Dilemma”
Linda Babcock is the James M. Walton Professor of Economics and former acting dean at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III College. She is the founder and faculty director of the Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society (PROGRESS) and a member of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Behavioral Economics Roundtable and has served on the economics review panel for the National Science Foundation. Her research, conducted at the interface between economics and psychology, has appeared in economics, industrial relations, psychology, and law journals and been discussed in international publications. Babcock is the 2007 winner of the Jeffrey Z. Rubin Theory-To-Practice Award from the International Association for Conflict Management. Babcock’s book, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton University Press, 2003), with Sara Laschever, was named by Fortune as one of the 75 smartest business books of all time and has been translated into six languages. Their other coauthored book, Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want (Bantam Dell, 2008), was a finalist for a 2008 Books for a Better Life Award. Babcock earned a PhD in economics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Antoine Bechara
“A Neurological Approach to Decision Making: The Somatic Marker Framework”
Antoine Bechara is a professor of neurology, neuroscience, and psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). His influential work, with António and Hanna Damásio as part of a larger group at the University of Iowa (and now at USC), focuses on the decision-making capabilities of patients who have suffered an injury to the ventromedial sector of their prefrontal cortex. Although the decision-making deficit in these patients was obvious in their day-to-day lives, there existed no laboratory probe able to detect and measure their impairment in the clinic. Bechara’s development of what became known as the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has enabled investigators, for the first time, to detect these patients’ elusive impairment in the laboratory, measure it, and investigate its possible causes. This work has drawn attention to the potential value of studying the neural basis of decision making and bringing this question to the laboratory by using structured decision-making tasks involving choices that mimic real-life situations. Bechara earned his BS and PhD from the University of Toronto.
Daniel Gilbert
Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. His research on “affective forecasting” examines the mistakes people make when they attempt to predict their hedonic reactions to future events. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006), spent 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has being translated into 30 languages, and was awarded the Royal Society’s General Prize for best science book of the year. Time called it “fascinating,” the New York Times called it “brilliant,” and Bloomberg News called it “the only truly useful book on psychology I’ve ever read.” Gilbert is a contributor to the New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Time; his short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Asimov’s Science Fiction, among others; and he has been a guest on numerous television and radio shows including 20/20, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, and the Today show. In 2010, he will host the six-hour NOVA television series Human Nature on PBS.
Eric Horvitz
“Action, Interaction, and Intelligence”
Eric Horvitz is a principal researcher and research area manager at Microsoft Research, working with teams doing research and development in machine learning and decision making, human-computer interaction, search and retrieval, computational theory, and cryptography. He is the current president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and is a fellow of that organization. Horvitz has served on the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering’s advisory board, the Information Science and Technology Study Group of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Naval Research Advisory Committee. He is currently associate editor of the Journal of the ACM, where he founded the Decisions, Uncertainty, and Computation area, and has been active on the editorial and advisory boards of several other journals. He received his PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. For more information, visit http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz and see the recently released Behind the Code segment titled “Minds, Machines, and Intelligence: A Conversation with Eric Horvitz.”
Dean Karlan
“Nudges in the Developing World”
Dean Karlan is an assistant professor of economics at Yale University and president of Innovations for Poverty Action. He is also codirector of the Financial Access Initiative, a consortium created with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; a research fellow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab; and cofounder and president of StickK.com. Karlan received a 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of financial decision making: specifically, which decisions work, which don’t, and why in microfinance and health. In microfinance, he has studied interest rate policy, credit evaluation and scoring policies, entrepreneurship training, group-versus-individual liability, savings product design, credit with education, and impact from increased access to credit. In his work on savings and health, he typically uses insights from psychology and behavioral economics to design and test specialized products. He has consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, FINCA International, and the Guatemalan government. Karlan received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MBA and an MPP from the University of Chicago, and a BA in international affairs from the University of Virginia.
George Loewenstein
“Using Decision Errors to Help People”
George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has held academic positions at the University of Chicago and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics and, more recently, of neuroeconomics. He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Loewenstein’s research focuses on applications of psychology to economics, and his specific interests include decision making over time, bargaining and negotiations, psychology and health, law and economics, the psychology of adaptation, the role of emotion in decision making, the psychology of curiosity, conflict of interest, and out-of-control behaviors like impulsive violent crime and drug addiction. He has published more than a hundred journal articles and numerous book chapters and has written or edited six books on topics such as intertemporal choice, behavioral economics, and emotions. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1985.
Rosalind A. Segal
Rosalind A. Segal is the director of the science program at the Radcliffe Institute and a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a member of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She was certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1992. She joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1995, first in neurology and then in neurobiology, and was promoted to professor in 2006. Her laboratory research focuses on the biology of brain tumors by probing the complex molecular machinery of the developing brain. In her research, she aims to understand the critical mechanisms for normal development and how deregulated cellular proliferation, migration, and survival can cause brain tumors and other neurological diseases. Her honors include the Robert H. Ebert Clinical Scholar award from the Esther A. & Joseph Klingenstein Fund, an award from the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research, and the NIH Directors Pioneer Award. Segal graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe with a BA in biochemistry, summa cum laude, and received a PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University and an MD from Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
Eldar Shafir
“A Behavioral Perspective on Decision Making and Policy”
Eldar Shafir is a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on descriptive analyses of decision making and on issues related to behavioral economics, with a special interest in decision making in the context of poverty. A central theme is the tension between normative assumptions and behavioral findings and the implications for the design and implementation of policy. Shafir received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now the Booth School of Business), the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Studies of Jerusalem, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, and Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Shafir has received the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award and the Chase Memorial Award from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Behavioral Economics Roundtable, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and codirector of Ideas42, a social science research and development lab.
Leigh Thompson
“Attachment Styles and Negotiation Performance”
Leigh Thompson is the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations, executive director of the Kellogg Team and Group Research Center, and director of the Leading High-Impact Teams executive program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Thompson has received a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation and been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She has published many research articles and nine books, including The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, fourth edition (Prentice Hall, 2009), and Making the Team: A Guide for Managers, third edition (Prentice Hall, 2007). Thompson is a member of the editorial boards of several publications and has served on the selection panel of the Decision, Risk, and Management Program at the National Science Foundation. She was named a fellow of the American Psychological Society and is a member of the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, Judgment and Decision Making Society, and Society for Experimental Social Psychologists. Thompson holds a BA in communication studies from Northwestern University, an MA in education from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a PhD in psychology from Northwestern University.
