Free Lunches: Insights from Behavioral Economics

Dan Ariely is the Luis Alvarez Renta Professor of Management Science at MIT, where he holds a joint appointment between MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the Sloan School of Management. He is also a visiting scholar at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and a fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton. At MIT, Dan is the principal investigator of the Media Lab's Rationality group, a co-director of the Lab's Simplicity consortium, and the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He and his students are conducting experiments that illuminate day-to-day irrationality in decision-making and creating software solutions to overcome persistent human shortcomings. Dan earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Tel Aviv University in 1991, master's and doctorate degrees in cognitive sychology from the University of North Carolina in 1994 and 1996, and a doctorate in Marketing from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in 1998, the year he joined the MIT faculty. His tenure four years later was one of the quickest in MIT history. As a behavioral economist, Dan studies how people _actually_ act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. His interests span a wide range of daily behaviors such as buying (or not), saving (or not), ordering food in restaurants, pain management, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision making under different emotional states.