Katherine L. Milkman

About

Katherine L. Milkman is the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with secondary appointments in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and School of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed to change consequential behaviors for good, including savings, exercise, student achievement, vaccination, and discrimination. She co-founded and co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Milkman has been recognized as one of the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2021 and 2023, and was named the world’s top strategy thinker in 2021. Her bestselling book, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, was named one of the eight best books for healthy living by The New York Times in 2021. She is a former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, a TEDx speaker, an APS Fellow, and hosts the behavioral economics podcast, Choiceology. Milkman has published extensively in leading academic journals and her work is regularly covered by major media outlets. She has advised numerous organizations, including The White House, Google, Walmart, Humana, the U.S. Department of Defense, 24 Hour Fitness, and the American Red Cross. She earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, where she studied Operations Research and American Studies, and her PhD from Harvard University, where she…

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Nursing
• Family medicine
• Virology
• Political Science

Selected publications

• 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

• A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 191 citations

  Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested incr…

  PublisherDOI

• A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19

  Nature · 2023 · 107 citations

  proposed 19 policy recommendations ('claims') detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supp…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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

• Hengchen Dai

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  65 shared

• John Beshears

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  51 shared

• Todd Rogers

  51 shared

• Angela Duckworth

  45 shared

• Dena M. Gromet

  University of Pennsylvania

  40 shared

• Kevin G. Volpp

  University of Pennsylvania

  35 shared

• Max H. Bazerman

  34 shared

• Silvia Saccardo

  Carnegie Mellon University

  33 shared

Labs

• Katherine L. MilkmanPI

Awards & honors

• APS Fellow

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

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• Christian Terwieschh-51