Prof. Drazen Prelec

Digital Equipment Corporation Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management
Professor of Economics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Primary DLC

MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Room: E62-540

Assistant

Nikolas Hill
nkh@mit.edu

Areas of Interest and Expertise

Consumer Behavior and Credit Cards
Consumer Psychology
Virtual Customer (VC) Initiative
Marketing
Management Science (MS)

Research Summary

Neuroeconomics -- Drazen Prelec’s research deals with the psychology and neuroscience of decision making (behavioral economics and neuroeconomics; risky choice, time discounting, self-control, consumer behavior). He works both on the development of normative decision theory and the exploration of the empirical failures of that theory, using behavioral and fMRI methods.

A current project on “self-signaling” tries to understand the strange power of non-causal motivation — when individuals favor actions that are diagnostic of good outcomes, even though these actions have little or no causal force. Diagnostic motivation is real, and is probably essential for human self-control. Its cognitive and neural mechanisms are not well understood however.

A second “Bayesian truth serum” project deals with scoring systems for evaluating individual and collective judgment in knowledge domains where no external truth criterion is available. Examples would be long-range forecasts, political or historical inferences, and artistic or legal interpretations. He is developing scoring systems that reward honest judgments, and that can identify truth even when majority opinion is wrong.

Recent Work