Nina Mazar
Professor, Marketing
I’m a behavioral scientist dedicated to advancing the science and practice of behavior change, focusing on topics ranging from consumer behavior to ethics to social & environmental impact.
I am part of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2023, was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (Poets&Quants, 2014), am a former president of the academic Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and co-founded BEworks, now part of the kyu collective.
In a nutshell, I investigate how cues in the environment as well as interactions with technology (i.e. AI), affect how we think about products, prices, donations, work, information sharing, advice taking, and in particular, ethics, and their implications for business, policy, and societal welfare. My research topics range from irrational attractions to free products to the paradoxes of green behavior, organ and blood donations, tax compliance, debt management, health equity, countering misinformation, and adoption and consequences of AI-products.
I was nominated for the SSHRC Aurora Prize for “Outstanding New Researcher” in Canada, and am the recipient of several teaching and research awards, including the William F. O’Dell Award of AMA’s Journal of Marketing Research (for having made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice), and, most recently, the 2022 Best Book of the Year award for my co-edited Book “Behavioral Science in the Wild (Habit Weekly) and the 2023 Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award (for my co-authored work on nudging organ donor registrations).
I have published my research in leading academic journals like the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Psychological Sciences, Review of Economic Studies, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Popular accounts of my work have appeared among others on NPR, BBC, in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Harvard Business Review, and my research has been featured in various New York Times bestsellers including Drive by Daniel Pink as well as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.
Public engagements/talks include the Canada Revenue Agency, European Commission, Department of State, World Bank, OECD, Toyota, Google Ventures, and IDEO.
Most recently, I acted as the senior behavioral scientist of the World Bank’s behavioral insights team (eMBeD) in Washington DC, which I helped initiate and I co-directed the Behavioral Economics in Action research center at Rotman (BEAR) – the first academic center in Canada dedicated to applying behavioral science to policy and organizations — as well as the Susilo Institute for Ethics in the Global Economy at Questrom.
I have been serving as advisor on boards of various governments and organizations. Past engagements include the Privy Council Office Innovation Hub for Behavioral Economics in Canada, the Austrian Minister for Family and Youth, Irrational Labs in San Francisco, CA, and the Martin Prosperity Institute (directed by Roger Martin, named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50).
Before joining academia I worked with a spin-off of KPMG as a management consultant in Germany. Before becoming a professor, I was a post-doctoral associate and lecturer in marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab eRationality Group. I’m also an alumni of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).
Education
PhD equivalent (Dr. rer. pol.), Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 2003
Selected Research Presentations
Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, IC2S2 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science, Philadelphia, 2024
Altintas, O. , Seidmann, A. , Gu, B. , Mazar, N. The Effects of Interpretable Artificial Intelligence on Repeated Managerial Decisions-Making under Uncertainty, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, 2023
Altintas, O. , Seidmann, A. , Gu, B. , Mazar, N. The Effects of Interpretable Artificial Intelligence on Repeated Managerial Decisions-Making Under Uncertainty, INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology, Phoenix, AZ, 2023
Mazar, N. Scaling and Translating Insights from Behavioral Science in the Wild, Keynote, International Conference on Environmental Psychology ICEP 2023, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark., 2023
Mazar, N. , Pizarro, D. , Barr, N. , Thomson, D. Human X Tech: Where we connect and disconnect with AI and Robotics – a behavioral science perspective, Panel Speaker, C2 Conference, Montreal, Canada, 2023
Mazar, N. Experiment Aversion Does Not Appear to Generalize, Seminar Speaker, Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse (IAST), University of Toulouse, France, 2023
Mazar, N. Behavioral Science in the Wild, Speaker, Thinkers50 Event: Passion and Purpose, Boston, MA, 2023
Mazar, N. Behavioral Science in the Wild, Digital Academy of Behavioral Economics, Fehr Advice, Zoom, 2023
Lee, C. , Mazar, N. , Morewedge, C. Are Preference Reversals Due to Decision Contexts or Elicitation Procedures? A Theoretical Reconciliation, Society of Consumer Psychology, 2023
Mazar, N. , Soman, D. Behavioral Science in the Wild, Seminar Speaker, Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, Princeton University, 2023
Ladhania, R. , Mazar, N. , Ungar, L. Personalized Treatment Assignment Rules for Vaccine Uptake in Behavioral Science Field Experiments with Large Multi-Arm Trials, 2022 Conference on Digital Experimentation (CoDE), MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2022
Alp Boz, H. , Bahrami, M. , Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. , Balcisoy, S. , Bozkaya, B. , Pentland, S. Neighborhood Resilience and Fragility to the COVID-19 Pandemic from a Mobility Network Perspective: The Case of New York City, IC2S2-22, Chicago, IL, 2022
Ladhania, R. , Mazar, N. , Ungar, L. Health Equity: Increasing Vaccine Uptake During the COVID-19 Pandemic With a Focus on Under-Represented Minorities in the USA, American Causal Inference Conference, Berkeley, 2022
Mazar, N. Organ Donor Registrations, Marketing Seminar Speaker Series, IESE, Barcelona, Spain, 2022
Mazar, N. Organ Donor Registrations, INSEAD Marketing Department Seminar Speaker Series, Fontainebleau, France, 2022
Mazar, N. Behavioral Insights for Public Good, Behavioral Insights Career Expo 2022, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2022
Mazar, N. Behavioral Science in the Wild: Getting individuals and organizations to pay their overdue taxes – what works and what doesn’t, UBC Decision Insights for Business & Society, Canada, 2022
House, J. , Lacetera, N. , Macis, M. , Mazar, N. Engaging the Middle Person: The Effect of Providing Performance Feedback to Customer Representatives on Organ Donor Registrations, SJDM 2021, 2022
Lee, C. , Mazar, N. , Morewedge, C. Are Preference Reversals due to Decision Contexts or Elicitation Procedures?, SJDM 2021, 2022
Pe’er, E. , Mazar, N. , Feldman, Y. , Ariely, D. Honesty Pledges Reduce Cheating Through Involvement and Identification, SJDM 2021, 2022
Publications
House, J., Lacetera, N., Macis, M., Mazar, N. (In Press). “Nudging the Nudger: Performance Feedback and Organ Donor Registrations”, Journal of Health Economics
Pe’er, E., Mazar, N., Feldman, Y., Ariely, D. (In Press). “How pledges reduce dishonesty: The role of involvement and identification.”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Boz, H., Bahrami, M., Balcisoy, S., Bozkaya, B., Mazar, N., Nichols, A., Pentland, A. (2024). “Investigating neighborhood adaptability using mobility networks: a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic”, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11:397 1-11
Mazar, N., Elbaek, C., Mitkidis, P. (2023). “Reply to Bas et al.: The difference between a genuine tendency and a context-specific response.”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 120 (50), e2318010120-e2318010120
Yang, S., Yeung, M., Barr, N., Lee, C., Malik, W., Mazar, N., Soman, D., Thomson, D. (2023). “The elements of context”, Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) Report series
Mazar, N., Elbaek, C., Mitkidis, P. (2023). “Experiment aversion does not appear to generalize”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 120 (16)
Madan, S., Johar, G., Berger, J., Chandon, P., Chandy, R., Hamilton, R., John, L., Labroo, A., Liu, P., Lynch, J., Mazar, N., Mead, N., Mittal, V., Moorman, C., Norton, M., Roberts, J., Soman, D., Viswanathan, M., White, K. (2023). “Reaching for rigor and relevance: better marketing research for a better world”, MARKETING LETTERS, 34 (1), 1-12
Hertwig, R., Mazar, N. (2022). “Toward a taxonomy and review of honesty interventions”, CURRENT OPINION IN PSYCHOLOGY, 47
Mazar, N. (2022). “Offering facts can improve COVID vaccine uptake”, NATURE, 606 (7914), 471-472
Soman, D., Mazar, N. (2022). “Six Prescriptions for Applied Behavioral Science as It Comes of Age”, Behavioral Scientist
Mazar, N., Soman, D. (2022). “Behavioral Science in the Wild”, University of Toronto Press
Milkman, K., Gandhi, L., Patel, M., Graci, H., Gromet, D., Ho, H., Kay, J., Lee, T., Rothschild, J., Bogard, J., Brody, I., Chabris, C., Chang, E., Chapman, G., Dannals, J., Goldstein, N., Goren, A., Hershfield, H., Hirsch, A., Hmurovic, J., Horn, S., Karlan, D., Kristal, A., Lamberton, C., Meyer, M., Oakes, A., Schweitzer, M., Shermohammed, M., Talloen, J., Warren, C., Whillans, A., Yadav, K., Zlatev, J., Berman, R., Evans, C., Ladhania, R., Ludwig, J., Mazar, N., Mullainathan, S., Snider, C., Spiess, J., Tsukayama, E., Ungar, L., van den Bulte, C., Volpp, K., Duckworth, A. (2022). “A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies”, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 119 (6)
Robitaille, N., House, J., Mazar, N. (2021). “Effectiveness of Planning Prompts on Organizations’ Likelihood to File Their Overdue Taxes: A Multi-Wave Field Experiment”, MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, 67 (7), 4327-4340
Mazar, N., Robitaille, N., House, J. (2021). “Are Repeat Nudges Effective? For Tardy Tax Filers, It Seems So”, Behavioral Scientist
Robitaille, N., Mazar, N., Tsai, C., Haviv, A., Hardy, E. (2021). “Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment”, JOURNAL OF MARKETING, 85 (3), 168-183
Gauri, V., Jamison, J., Mazar, N., Ozier, O. (2021). “Motivating bureaucrats through social recognition: External validity?A tale of two states*”, ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES, 163 117-131
Mazar, N., Robitaille, N., House, J. (2021). “Do Behavioral Nudges Work on Organizations?”, Harvard Business Review
Mazar, N. (2021). “How Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives can Benefit from Behavioral Science”, BEworks Choice Architecture Report 2021