Drazen Prelec (born 1955 in Yugoslavia[1]) is a professor of management science and economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management,[2] and holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well.[3] He is a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics.[4]

Prelec studied applied mathematics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in experimental psychology, supervised by Richard Herrnstein and Duncan Luce. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and was a Guggenheim Fellow.[5] He joined the MIT faculty in 1991.[2]

Prelec has made seminal contributions to theories of intertemporal choice, in particular the generalized theory of hyperbolic discounting,[6] as well as to non-expected utility theories, in particular probability weighting functions.[7] He is also responsible for developing the theory of self-signaling.[8]

A study by Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people buying tickets to sporting events would be willing to pay significantly higher prices using credit cards than they would for cash purchases.[9][10][11] Working in the area of Wisdom of the crowd, Prelec also devised a system, the "Bayesian Truth Serum", for eliciting more truthful answers to polls based on paired questions in which one question of each pair asks about the respondent's own opinion and the other asks the respondent to estimate others' opinions.[12]

Prelec is of Croatian descent.

References

  1. ^ "Drazen Prelec distinguished Croatian expert for Neuroeconomics and professor at MIT, USA".
  2. ^ a b "Faculty & Research: Drazen Prelec". MIT Sloan School of Management. Retrieved 2015-08-03.
  3. ^ "Drazen Prelec MIT Sloan". MIT Sloan School of Management. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  4. ^ Nichols, Michelle (June 4, 2004). "The crazy logic of a successful sale". Business Week. Archived from the original on September 26, 2008..
  5. ^ "The Harvard Game in a Market Setting". Yale Center for the Study of American Politics. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  6. ^ Loewenstein, George; Prelec, Drazen (1 May 1992). "Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an Interpretation*". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 107 (2): 573–597. doi:10.2307/2118482. JSTOR 2118482. S2CID 15959172.
  7. ^ Prelec, Drazen (1998). "The Probability Weighting Function". Econometrica. 66 (3): 497–527. doi:10.2307/2998573. JSTOR 2998573.
  8. ^ Mijović-Prelec, Danica; Prelec, Draz̆en (27 January 2010). "Self-deception as self-signalling: a model and experimental evidence". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 365 (1538): 227–240. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0218. PMC 2827460. PMID 20026461.
  9. ^ Morin, Richard (February 17, 2002). "Don't leave home with it". The Washington Post. p. B5.
  10. ^ Rosato, Donna (June 17, 2008). "Life without plastic". CNN. Archived from the original on December 23, 2009.
  11. ^ Harford, Tim (March 19, 2009). "Your Brain on Credit". Forbes.
  12. ^ McKee, Maggie (October 14, 2004). "Mathematical "truth serum" promotes honesty". New Scientist.
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