Barbara Mellers

Barbara Mellers
  • I. George Heyman University Professor
  • Professor of Marketing
  • Professor of Psychology

Contact Information

  • office Address:

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

Links: CV

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.

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Research

  • Pavel Atanasov, J. Witkowski, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (Under Review), The person-situation debate revisited: Forecasting skill matters more than elicitation method.

  • Philip Tetlock, Lu Yunzi, Barbara Mellers (2022), False Dichotomy Alert: Improving Subjective-Probability Estimates vs. Raising Awareness of Systemic Risk, International Journal of Forecasting.

  • E. Karger, J.T Monrad, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (Under Review), Reciprocal scoring: A method for forecasting unanswerable questions.

  • Ike Silver, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (2021), Wise teamwork: Collective confidence calibration predicts the effectiveness of group discussion, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology .

  • Siyuan Yin, H. Arkes, John McCoy, Morris A. Cohen, Barbara Mellers (2021), Conflicting Goals Influence Physicians’ Expressed Beliefs to Patients and Colleagues, Medical Decision Making.

  • Ville Satopää, Marat Salikhov, Philip Tetlock, Barbara Mellers (2021), Decomposing the Effects of Crowd-Wisdom Aggregators: The Bias-Information-Noise (BIN) Model, International Journal of Forecasting.

  • Christopher Karvetski, Carolyn Meinel, Daniel Maxwell, Lu Yunzi, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (2021), Forecasting the Accuracy of Forecasters from Properties of Forecasting Rationales, International Journal of Forecasting.

  • Barbara Mellers, Siyuan Yin, Jonathan Z. Berman (2021), Reconciling Loss Aversion and Gain Seeking in Judged Emotions, Current Directions.

  • Ville Satopää, Marat Salikhov, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (2021), Bias, Information, Noise: The BIN Model of Forecasting, Management Science.

  • Abraham Aldama, Cristina Bicchieri, Jana Freundt, Barbara Mellers, Ellen Peters (2021), How perceptions of autonomy relate to beliefs about inequality and fairness, PlosOne.

Teaching

PSYC 253 Judgments and Decisions

PSYC 600 Proseminar in Judgments and Decisions

MDS 521 Judgments and Decisions

MKTG 211 Consumer Behavior

MKTG 960 Seminar in Consumer Behavior

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Latest Research

Pavel Atanasov, J. Witkowski, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock (Under Review), The person-situation debate revisited: Forecasting skill matters more than elicitation method.
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