Applied Behavioral Finance Program

Dan Ariely, PhD^​
Professor, Duke University

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He does research in behavioral economics on the irrational ways people behave, described in plain language. His immersive introduction to irrationality took place as he overcame injuries sustained in an explosion. During a range of treatments in the burn department he faced a variety of irrational behaviors that were immensely painful and persistent. He began researching ways to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients. Ariely became engrossed with the idea that we repeatedly and predictably make the wrong decisions in many aspects of our lives and that research could help change some of these patterns. After using his knowledge of decision-making and behavioral economics to convince his girlfriend to marry him, Ariely realized that understanding decision-making can help anyone in their daily life. Irrationally Yours, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, the movie Dishonesty and the card game Irrational Game are his attempt to describe his research findings in non-academic terms, so that more people will discover the excitement of behavioral economics and use some of the insights to enrich their own lives.

Andrew W. Lo, PhD^​

Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

His current research spans five areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk and financial regulation, quantitative models of financial markets, financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation, and healthcare finance. Recent projects include: deriving risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and other behaviors as emergent properties of evolution in stochastic environments; constructing new measures of systemic risk and comparing them across time and systemic events; applying spectral analysis to investment strategies to decompose returns into fundamental frequencies; and developing new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel financing structures.

Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. His awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry M. Markowitz Award; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Econometric Society; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.

Lo is also a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers, and the boards of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
 

Carl Richards, CFP^®​
Author, The Behavior Gap

Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, appearing weekly in The New York Times since 2010.

Carl has also been featured on Marketplace Money, Oprah.com, and Forbes.com. In addition, Carl has become a frequent keynote speaker at financial planning conferences and visual learning events around the world.

Through his simple sketches, Carl makes complex financial concepts easy to understand. His sketches also serve as the foundation for his two books, The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money and The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money (Portfolio/Penguin).

His sketches have appeared in a solo show at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah as well as other showings at Parsons School of Design in New York City, The Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, and an exhibit at the Mansion House in London. His commissioned work is on display in businesses and educational institutions across the globe.

 

 

Meir Statman, PhD

Professor, Santa Clara University

Meir Statman is the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University and Visiting Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and his B.A. and M.B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on behavioral finance. He attempts to understand how investors and managers make financial decisions and how these decisions are reflected in financial markets. The questions he addresses include: What are the cognitive errors and emotions that influence investors? What are investor aspirations? How can financial advisors and plan sponsors help investors? What is the nature of risk and regret? How do investors form portfolios? How successful are tactical asset allocation and strategic asset allocation? What determines stock returns? What are the effects of sentiment? How successful are socially responsible investors? Meir’s research has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, and many other journals. Meir is a recipient of a Batterymarch Fellowship, a William F. Sharpe Best Paper Award, a Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Outstanding Article Award, a Davis Ethics Award, a Moskowitz Prize for best paper on socially responsible investing, two Baker IMCA Awards, and three Graham and Dodd Scroll Awards. Meir consults with many investment companies and presents his work to academics and professionals in many forums in the U.S. and abroad.
 

Tobias Moskowitz, PhD

Professor, Chicago Booth School of Buisness

Toby contributes research on asset pricing and investment issues to domestic and international strategies for AQR's Global Alternatives Premia team. He currently holds the Fama Family Chaired Professorship in Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has won numerous awards for his academic research, as well as the Fischer Black Prize, which recognizes the best financial economist under the age of 40. Toby earned a B.S. in industrial management/industrial engineering with honors and an M.S. in finance from Purdue University, as well as a Ph.D. in finance from the University of California at Los Angeles.