Drazen Prelec

About

Drazen Prelec is the Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and a Professor of Management Science and Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His research deals with the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making, including behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, risky choice, time discounting, self-control, and consumer behavior. Prelec works on both the development of normative decision theory and the exploration of empirical failures of that theory, utilizing behavioral and fMRI methods. His current projects include understanding the power of non-causal motivation, termed 'self-signaling,' and developing scoring systems for evaluating judgments in domains lacking external truth criteria, such as forecasts and artistic or legal interpretations. He has received numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and has a distinguished academic background with an AB in applied mathematics and a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Mathematics
• Finance
• Data science
• Biology
• Economics
• Business

Selected publications

• Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science

  Nature · 2021 · 98 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Neural mechanisms of credit card spending

  Scientific Reports · 2021 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Credit cards have often been blamed for consumer overspending and for the growth in household debt. Indeed, laboratory studies of purchase behavior have shown that credit cards can facilitate spending in ways that are difficult to justify on purely financial grounds. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this spending facilitation effect remain conjectural. A leading hypothesis is that credit cards reduce the pain of payment and so 'release the brakes' that hold expenditures in check. Alt…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cheaters, Liars, or Both? A New Classification of Dishonesty Profiles

  Psychological Science · 2020 · 29 citations

  = 172) employed a six-sided-die roll, which permitted gradations in dishonesty. We replicated some previous results and also provide a new, richer classification of dishonest behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• What makes dynamic strategic problems difficult? Evidence from an experimental study

  Strategic Management Journal · 2020-11-04 · 22 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Research Summary Managers regularly deal with dynamic tasks, where decisions impact immediate payoffs as well as long‐term capabilities. Research shows that people do poorly in dynamic tasks, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. These may range from unsystematic problem‐solving to rational learning in complex environments. In a series of experiments, we tease apart alternative explanations, showing that poor performance is due to behavioral difficulties. Remarkably, we find that p…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Bayesian Hierarchical Model of Crowd Wisdom Based on Predicting Opinions of Others

  Management Science · 2023-10-19 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  In many domains, it is necessary to combine opinions or forecasts from multiple individuals. However, the average or modal judgment is often incorrect, shared information across respondents can result in correlated errors, and weighting judgments by confidence does not guarantee accuracy. We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model of crowd wisdom that incorporates predictions about others to address these aggregation challenges. The proposed model can be applied to single questions, and it can als…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• George Loewenstein

  56 shared

• David Pascual‐Ezama

  Harvard University

  18 shared

• Dan Ariely

  Duke University

  15 shared

• Beatriz Gil-Gómez de Liaño

  Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

  12 shared

• Sonja Radas

  11 shared

• Jakša Cvitanić

  California Institute of Technology

  8 shared

• Colin F. Camerer

  7 shared

• Clemens R. Scherzer

  Harvard University

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• John R. Hauserh-77
• Catherine Tuckerh-60
• Duncan Simesterh-43