Hengchen Dai

About

Hengchen Dai is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She joined UCLA Anderson in 2017 and is also a faculty member in Anderson’s Behavioral Decision Making area. Prior to her current position, she served on the faculty of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Dai is the co-director of the UCLA Nudge Unit, which applies insights from behavioral science to develop interventions for improving clinical quality, and she serves as a Senior Editor for Organization Science. Her research focuses on understanding what motivates people, with particular attention to how and why various kinds of “fresh starts” affect self-control and motivation, how others’ behaviors and judgments influence individual motivation, and how behavioral economics and psychology can be used to design policy interventions that steer people toward farsighted decision making. Dai’s work is published in top journals across science, management, psychology, marketing, and medical fields. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Association for Psychological Science Fellow, the Janet Taylor Spence Award, and the Robert B. Cialdini Prize, among others. Dai teaches in UCLA Anderson’s executive MBA, fully employed MBA, and full-time MBA programs, and has been recognized as one of Poets & Quants’ World’s Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Nursing
• Computer Science
• Family medicine
• Immunology
• Gerontology
• Environmental health
• Applied psychology

Selected publications

• Behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations

  Nature · 2021 · 461 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  , and highlight the value of making vaccination easy and inducing feelings of ownership over vaccines.

  DOI

• A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor’s appointment

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 348 citations

  = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%. Overall, interventions performed better when they were 1) framed as reminders to get flu shots that were already reserved for the patient and 2) congruent with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science

  Nature · 2021 · 254 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Impact of Social Nudges on User-Generated Content for Social Network Platforms

  Management Science · 2022-12-09 · 68 citations

  article

  Content-sharing social network platforms rely heavily on user-generated content to attract users and advertisers, but they have limited authority over content provision. We develop an intervention that leverages social interactions between users to stimulate content production. We study social nudges, whereby users connected with a content provider on a platform encourage that provider to supply more content. We conducted a randomized field experiment (N [Formula: see text]) on a video-sharing s…

  PublisherDOI

• A Mega-Study of Text-Based Nudges Encouraging Patients to Get Vaccinated at an Upcoming Doctor’s Appointment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 66 citations

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Katherine L. Milkman

  California University of Pennsylvania

  65 shared

• Silvia Saccardo

  Carnegie Mellon University

  58 shared

• Ilana Brody

  37 shared

• Angela Duckworth

  30 shared

• Dennis Zhang

  Washington University in St. Louis

  30 shared

• Dena M. Gromet

  University of Pennsylvania

  30 shared

• Mitesh S. Patel

  Ascension

  24 shared

• Maria Han

  University of California, Los Angeles

  20 shared

Education

• PhD

  University of Pennsylvania

  2015

Awards & honors

• Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences…
• Association for Psychological Science Fellow (2024)
• Academy of Management MOC Division Best Paper Award (2024)
• Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Aw…
• The 2023 Behavioral Science & Policy Association’s Best Publ…

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