Barbara Mellers

I. George Heyman University Professor
Professor of Marketing
Professor of Psychology

Contact Information

Primary Email:
mellers@wharton.upenn.edu
Office Phone:
(215) 898-1223

office Address:
765 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304

Overview

In January 2011, Barbara Mellers was appointed as the 11th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. Mellers, a globally influential scholar of decision making, is the I. George Heyman University Professor. This appointment is shared between the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Marketing in The Wharton School.

Mellers’ research examines the factors that influence judgments and decisions, including emotions, self-interest, past mistakes, sensitivities to risk and perceptions of fairness. She is an author of almost 100 articles and book chapters, co-editor of two books and a member of numerous prestigious editorial boards. She served as president of the Judgment and Decision Making Society, was a five-year National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and has received major research support from the NSF.

She earned a Ph.D. in 1981 and an M.A. in 1978 in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in 1974, also in psychology from Berkeley.

Research

Barbara Mellers, Decision making (Forthcoming)
Barbara Mellers, J. Shanteau, D. Schum (Forthcoming), Decision science and technology: Reflections on the contributions of Ward Edwards,.
Barbara Mellers and J. Baron (Forthcoming), Psychological perspectives on justice: Theory and applications,.
Barbara Mellers and Philip E. Tetlock (Forthcoming), Structuring accountability systems in organizations: Key tradeoffs and critical unknowns,.
Barbara Mellers, H. Blanton, J. Jaccard, J. Klick, G. Mitchell, P. Tetlock (Forthcoming), Weak defense of weak evidence: Transparency trumps trust, Journal of Applied Psychology.
Evan Weingarten, Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers (Under Review), Multiple Goals as Reference Points.
Jonathan Baron, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Eric Stone, Lyle Ungar (2015), Two Reasons to Make Aggregated Probability Forecasts More Extreme, Decision Analysis.
Barbara Mellers, Eric Stone, Terry Murray, Angela Minster, Nick Rohrbaugh, Michael Bishop, Eva Chen, Joshua Baker, Yuan Hou, Michael Horowitz, Lyle Ungar, Philip Tetlock (2015), Identifying and Cultivating Superforecasters as a Method of Improving Probabilistic Predictions, Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Mandeep Dhami, David Mandel, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (2015), Improving Intelligence Analysis with Decision Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Edgar Merkle, Mark Steyvers, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (2015), Item Response Models of Probability Judgments: Application to a Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament, decision.