On Amir

About

On Amir is the Wolfe Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Life Sciences Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and a Professor of Marketing at UC San Diego. His research focuses on using psychological and economic principles to identify successful strategies in various market settings. He investigates customer decision-making mechanisms and their influences on pricing, promotion strategies, decision making under risk and uncertainty, and preference dynamics. Amir explores how insights from behavioral economics and decision-making research can be applied to improve business practices and policy making. Prior to his current position, Amir was an assistant professor of marketing at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. in management science and marketing from MIT's Sloan School of Management in 2003. His work has been recognized with several research awards from the Marketing Science Institute and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, reflecting his significant contributions to the fields of marketing, behavioral economics, and consumer decision-making.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Pedagogy
• Data science
• Epistemology
• Acoustics
• Communication

Selected publications

• What makes people happy? Decoupling the experiential‐material continuum

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2022 · 27 citations

  Abstract Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative dominance: more material or more experiential. This focus on relative dominance leaves unanswered questions regarding how different levels of material and experiential qualities each contribute to…

  PublisherDOI

• Improving cardiac rehabilitation patient adherence via personalized interventions

  PLoS ONE · 2022-08-29 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVES: Despite documented benefits and physicians' recommendations to participate in cardiac rehabilitation (CR) programs, the average dropout rate remains between 12-56%. This study's goal was to demonstrate that using personalized interventions can significantly increase patient adherence. METHOD: Ninety-five patients (ages 18-90) eligible for the CR program were randomly recruited and received personalized interventions using the Well-Beat system. Adherence levels were compared to those…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2022 · 19 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tangential Immersion: Increasing Persistence in Boring Consumer Behaviors

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2021-12-10 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Consumers’ lives are filled with myriad behaviors that can be successfully executed with minimal attention. Many such low-attention behaviors benefit from persistence but are often not performed long enough (e.g., hygiene, exercise). The current work examines consumer persistence-failures through an attentional lens. Specifically, drawing on boredom and resource-matching frameworks, we suggest one key driver of poor consumer persistence is that many behaviors demand less attention than…

  PublisherDOI

• Human Experts Outperform Technology in Creative Markets

  She ji · 2020 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Technological advances have enabled machines to displace humans both in physical tasks and in higher-skilled fields that require extensive knowledge or training. Recently, there has been an outpour contending that advances in artificial intelligence mean technology can outperform human creative experts. We explore whether artificial intelligence outperforms humans in domains that depend upon the spark of creativity. Two logo design studies and seven evaluation studies explore the performance of…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dan Ariely

  Duke University

  23 shared

• Nina Mažar

  14 shared

• Kristen Duke

  University of Toronto

  14 shared

• Orly Lobel

  University of San Diego

  12 shared

• Coby Morvinski

  11 shared

• Wendy Liu

  University of Kentucky

  10 shared

• Alicea Lieberman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  9 shared

• Kelly Goldsmith

  9 shared

Labs

• Atkinson Behavioral Research LabPI

Awards & honors

• Research awards from the Marketing Science Institute
• Research awards from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation

Similar researchers at University of California, San Diego

• Erik Johnsonh-46
• Joseph Engelbergh-42
• Sujit Deyh-41