Class of 1987 Professor

531 Peretsman Scully Hall

shafir@princeton.edu

Ph.D., Massachusettes Institute of Technology

Curriculum Vit? (174.92 KB)

Summary Main areas of interest include reasoning, judgment, and decision-making, and issues related to behavioral economics, with an emphasis on descriptive studies of how people make judgments and decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty. What strategies do people employ in arriving at their decisions? Do these strategies lead to systematic biases and predictable errors? And what do these tell us about the way the mind processes the relevant information? A central theme is the tension between normative assumptions and behavioral findings. Most recently, the focus has been on decision making in the context of poverty and, more generally, on the application of behavioral research to policy.






Representative Publications
Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Jiaying Zhao 2013. Poverty Impede Cognitive Function. Science, Vol. 341, pp. 976-980.

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Olivola, C.Y., & Shafir, E. 2013. The Martyrdom Effect: When pain and effort increase prosocial contributions. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26, 91-105.

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Shah, A., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. 2012. Some consequences of having too little. Science, Vol. 338, no. 6107, pp. 682-685.

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Sussman, A., Shafir, E. 2012. On Assets and Debt in the Psychology of Perceived Wealth. Psychological Science, 23(I), 101-108.

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Kling, J., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., Vermeulen, L., Wrobel, M. 2012. Comparison Friction: Experimental Evidence from Medical Drug Plans. The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2012), 1–37.

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