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

  • Evan Weingarten, Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers (Under Review), Multiple Goals as Reference Points.

  • 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.

  • Barbara Mellers, Eric Stone, Pavel Atanasov, Nick Rohrbaugh, S. E. Metz, Lyle Ungar, Michael Bishop, Michael Horowitz (2015), The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

  • Jonathan Baron, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Eric Stone, Lyle Ungar (2015), Two Reasons to Make Aggregated Probability Forecasts More Extreme, Decision Analysis.

  • Ville Satopää, Shane T. Jensen, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Lyle H. Ungar (2014), Probability Aggregation in Time-Series: Dynamic Hierarchical Modeling of Sparse Expert Beliefs, The Annals of Statistics, 8 (2), pp. 1256-1280.

  • Burcu Gurcay, Barbara Mellers, Jonathan Baron (2014), The Power of Social Influence on Estimation Accuracy, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making,.

  • Sara Levens, Jeff Larsen, Joel Bruss, Daniel Tranel, A. Bechara, Barbara Mellers (2014), What might have been?, Neuropsychologia.

  • Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Nick Rohrbaugh, Eva Chen (2014), Forecasting Tournaments: Tools for Increasing Transparency and Improving the Quality of Debate, Current Directions in Psychological Science.

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

Current Courses

  • MKTG950 - Jdgmnt & Dec Making Cb A

    The purpose of this course is to provide a solid foundation for critical thinking and research on the judgment, decision-making and choice aspects of consumer behavior. There is a focus on how people process information when making judgments and choices and how the processes of judgment and choice might be improved. Topics of discussion include rationality, judgment under uncertainty, judgment heuristics and biases, risk taking, dealing with conflicting values, framing effects, prospect theory, inter-temporal choice, preference formation, and the psychology of utility. The focus will be on the individual decision-maker, although the topics will also have some applicability to group and organizational decision-making and behavioral research methodologies.

    MKTG950301 ( Syllabus )

In the News

Knowledge @ Wharton

Activity

Latest Research

Evan Weingarten, Sudeep Bhatia, Barbara Mellers (Under Review), Multiple Goals as Reference Points.
All Research

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