Drazen Prelec (born 1955 in Yugoslavia [1] ) is a professor of management science and economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management, [2] and holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well. [3] He is a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics. [4]
Prelec studied applied mathematics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in experimental psychology, supervised by Richard Herrnstein and Duncan Luce. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and was a Guggenheim Fellow. [5] He joined the MIT faculty in 1991. [2]
Prelec has made seminal contributions to theories of intertemporal choice, in particular the generalized theory of hyperbolic discounting, [6] as well as to non-expected utility theories, in particular probability weighting functions. [7] He is also responsible for developing the theory of self-signaling. [8]
A study by Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people buying tickets to sporting events would be willing to pay significantly higher prices using credit cards than they would for cash purchases. [9] [10] [11] Working in the area of Wisdom of the crowd, Prelec also devised a system, the "Bayesian Truth Serum", for eliciting more truthful answers to polls based on paired questions in which one question of each pair asks about the respondent's own opinion and the other asks the respondent to estimate others' opinions. [12]
Prelec is of Croatian descent.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist who is currently a professor of economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly the McLellan/Regent’s Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics, which helped establish “laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”.
Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by classical economic theory.
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision-making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to follow through on a plan of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of the brain, and how neuroscientific discoveries can guide models of economics.
David Isaac Laibson is an American economist and professor at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1994. His research focuses on macroeconomics, intertemporal choice, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. In 2016, he became chairman of the Harvard economics department.
In economics, dynamic inconsistency or time inconsistency is a situation in which a decision-maker's preferences change over time in such a way that a preference can become inconsistent at another point in time. This can be thought of as there being many different "selves" within decision makers, with each "self" representing the decision-maker at a different point in time; the inconsistency occurs when not all preferences are aligned.
Howard Raiffa was an American academic who was the Frank P. Ramsey Professor (Emeritus) of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by the Business School and Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was an influential Bayesian decision theorist and pioneer in the field of decision analysis, with works in statistical decision theory, game theory, behavioral decision theory, risk analysis, and negotiation analysis. He helped found and was the first director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Jacob Marschak was an American economist.
Steven Lawrence Kleiman is an American mathematician.
Risk inclination (RI) is defined as a mental disposition (i.e., confidence) toward an eventuality (i.e., a predicted state) that has consequences (i.e., either loss or gain). The risk inclination model (RIM) is composed of three constructs: confidence weighting, restricted context, and the risk inclination formula. Each of these constructs connects an outside observer with a respondent's inner state of risk taking toward knowledge certainty.
George W. Ainslie is an American psychiatrist, psychologist and behavioral economist. He is chief Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine.
Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.
Risk aversion is a preference for a sure outcome over a gamble with higher or equal expected value. Conversely, rejection of a sure thing in favor of a gamble of lower or equal expected value is known as risk-seeking behavior.
Paul W. Glimcher is an American neuroeconomist, neuroscientist, psychologist, economist, scholar, and entrepreneur. He is one of the foremost researchers focused on the study of human behavior and decision-making, and is known for his central role in founding and developing the field of neuroeconomics which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how humans make decisions. Glimcher also founded the Institute for the Study of Decision Making at New York University (NYU). Today he serves as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Neurosciences Institute at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine.
Peter L. Bossaerts is a Belgian-American economist. He is considered one of the pioneers and leading researchers in neuroeconomics and experimental finance. He is Professor of Neuroeconomics at the University of Cambridge.
Elchanan Mossel is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research fields are probability theory, combinatorics, and statistical inference.
Edi Karni is an Israeli born American economist and decision theorist. Karni is the Scott and Barbara Black Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and an Economic Theory Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.
Joel Sobel is an American economist and currently professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on game theory and has been seminal in the field of strategic communication in economic games. His work with Vincent Crawford established the game-theoretic concept of cheap talk.