Professor Dan Ariely

Professor Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and he also holds an appointment at MIT. He is also a director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. Ariely obtained a B.A. in Psychology at Tel Aviv University in 1991, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of North Carolina in 1994 and 1996 respectively. Finally, in 1998 he completed a Ph.D. in Business from Duke University.

He is an expert on how people act and why in all kinds of business and economic environments, and what this means for business innovation, strategy, marketing and pricing. At the core of his scientific research is his desire to find out how and why people make certain decisions. Some of the current projects he is working on include Marketing: Trust & Revenge; Bidder behavior in online Auctions; Online dating; (Dis)Honesty; What is "no": The no-choice option; Micropayments: Pain and pleasure; etc. Professor  Ariely is interested in a large area of human behavior, and his experiments are consistently interesting, fun and informative.

In his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008) Ariely provides new insights into human behavior for making better decisions on a personal level, as well as a business & societal level. In his book Ariely explains why and how expectations, emotions, social norms and other invisible forces influence on biased comprehension of (un)reasonable decisions. The author discloses, in an amusing way, that not only do we make tiny mistakes, but we make the same type of mistakes repeatedly. Dan Ariely offers solutions and shows how decision-making can be fun, whether choosing which coffee to drink or in which stocks to invest.

Professor Dan Ariely won an Ig Nobel in 2008 for his study that found more expensive fake medicines worked better than cheaper fake medicines. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early fall for interesting, unusual, even comical medical researches. He has published numerous studies in leading psychology, economics, and marketing and management research journals, as well as the popular press such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Scientific American and Science.  He has even made a guest appearance on CNN.

“Understanding irrationality is important not only for our everyday activities and decisions, but also for the understanding of the way we create our environment and the choices it puts before us.", Professor  Dan Ariely.