Nina Mazar

Professor, Boston University Questrom School of Business

bio:

Nina Mažar is Professor of Marketing at Questrom School of Business at Boston University.

Nina was the 2019 president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and has been named one of "The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (2014). With her focus on behavioral science she examines ways to help individuals and organizations make better decisions and increase societal welfare. Popular accounts of her work have appeared among others on NPR, BBC, Wired, and various NYTimes Bestsellers as well as in the film “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.”

Nina is the co-founder of BEworks, a former co-director of University of Toronto’s BEAR center, and former inaugural Senior Behavioral Scientist of the World Bank’s behavioral insights team (eMBeD) in Washington, DC. She has served as advisor on boards of various government (Austrian Minister for Families and Youth) and organizations (e.g., Irrational Labs in San Francisco, CA). She holds a Dr. rer. pol. in Marketing from the University of Mainz in Germany.

Website: ninamazar.com

Journal Publications:

  • Robitaille, Nicole, Julian House, and Nina Mazar (2021): Effectiveness of Planning Prompts on Organizations’ Likelihood to File their Overdue Taxes: A Multi-wave Field Experiment, Management Science, July 2021, 67(7), 4327-4340. – accepted June 15, 2020.

  • Robitaille, Nicole, Nina Mazar, Claire I. Tsai, Avery M. Haviv, and Elizabeth Hardy (2021): Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment, Journal of Marketing – Special Issue “Better Marketing for a Better World,” May 2021, 85(3), 168-183. – accepted January 6, 2021.

  • Gauri, Varun, Julian Jamison, Nina Mazar, and Owen Ozier (2021): Motivating Bureaucrats through Social Recognition: External Validity – a Tale of Two States, Organizational Behavioral and Human Decision Processes – Special Issue “Nudges and Choice Architecture in Organizations,” 163(March), 117-131. (authors in alphabetical order) – accepted May 22, 2019.

Other Publications:

  • Mazar, Nina, Nicole Robitaille, and Julian House (2021). Do Behavioral Nudges Work on Organizations? Harvard Business Review, February 22.

  • Mazar, Nina (2021). How Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives can Benefit from Behavioral Science. BEworks Choice Architecture Report 2021.

  • Mazar, Nina (2020). The Future of Behavioral Economics. BEworks Choice Architecture Report 2020.

  • Klotz, Leidy et al. (2019). Twenty Questions About Design Behavior for Sustainability, Report of the International Expert Panel on Behavioral Science for Design, New York. Nature Sustainability.

  • Mazar, Nina (2019). Behavioral Economics: Responsibility and Accountability (guest editorial), in The Behavioral Economics Guide 2019, edited by Alain Samson. Available at http://www.behavioraleconomics.com. Republished in French late 2019.

3 questions:

  • What aspects of this research agenda are you most excited about?

I’m particularly excited about extending and applying the comprehensive framework developed by BIOrg to behavior change challenges in business and in the social/policy realm.

  • Of all the work you have done, what project / paper is your personal favourite and why?

My personal favorite is the large scale tax experiment that I conducted together with the World Bank’s eMBeD team: 10 interventions randomly assigned to every single personal income tax payer in Poland.

  •  Which is the one paper or book that you wish you had written (but have not)?

    There are so many :-) Hard to pick only one! But this is certainly one of my new favorites:

    He, J.C., Kang, S.K., & Lacetera, N. (2021). Opt-out choice framing attenuates gender differences in the decision to compete in the lab and in the field. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.