Drazen Prelec (born 1955 in
Yugoslavia) is a professor of management science and economics in the
MIT Sloan School of Management,
and holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well. He is a pioneer in the field of
neuroeconomics.
Prelec studied
applied mathematics as an undergraduate at
Harvard University, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in
experimental psychology
Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, in ...
, supervised by
Richard Herrnstein and
Duncan Luce
Robert Duncan Luce (May 16, 1925 – August 11, 2012) was an American mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology. At the end of his life, he held the position of Distingui ...
. He was a Junior Fellow of the
Harvard Society of Fellows and was a
Guggenheim Fellow.
He joined the MIT faculty in 1991.
Prelec has made seminal contributions to theories of intertemporal choice, in particular the generalized theory of
hyperbolic discounting, as well as to non-expected utility theories, in particular probability weighting functions. He is also responsible for developing the theory of self-signaling.
A study by Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people buying tickets to sporting events would be willing to pay significantly higher prices using credit cards than they would for cash purchases. Working in the area of
Wisdom of the crowd, Prelec also devised a system, the "Bayesian Truth Serum", for eliciting more truthful answers to
polls based on paired questions in which one question of each pair asks about the respondent's own opinion and the other asks the respondent to estimate others' opinions.
Prelec is of
Croatian descent.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prelec, Drazen
1955 births
Harvard University alumni
21st-century American economists
Living people
MIT Sloan School of Management faculty
American people of Croatian descent
Scientists from Zagreb