Shane Frederick named Richard Ely Professor of Marketing
Shane Frederick has been appointed the Richard Ely Professor of Marketing.
He is a faculty member at the Yale School of Management (SOM), and the most cited member of their marketing group (with more than 28,000 citations on Google Scholar).
Frederick is one of the world’s leading scholars in judgment and decision making (or “JDM”) — a multidisciplinary field lying at the intersection of cognitive psychology, economics, and marketing, which seeks to advance understanding of how people think, decide, form beliefs, and make judgments.
In his work, he has challenged how scholars in economics and psychology have conceptualized (and attempted to measure) time preferences and risk preferences. He’s also proposed new theories for two robust and puzzling phenomena: the “endowment effect” (the disparity between the compensation people demand to relinquish something and the amount they’d pay to acquire it) and “anchoring” (the influence of numeric referents on judgments). The anchoring effect had been widely documented previously, but little consensus had emerged regarding it’s boundary conditions or the psychological mechanisms underlying it. His research offers insights to both issues, showing that numeric anchors often affect people’s use of the provided response scale rather than their actual perception of the focal stimulus. In so doing, he overturned a long-standing assumption that response scale effects were limited to subjective scales. His recent publications examine the formation of intuitions and the cognitive impediments that prevent erroneous intuitions from being revised.
Ferderick is also a valued teacher and colleague in the Yale community. The course he co-created “Behavioral Economics” is now a popular elective at SOM, and his “passionate” teaching style has inspired many SOM students (and some executives) to introspect about whether they too are beset by the cognitive biases he discusses. As a colleague, he’s known for his commitment to excellence, his advocacy for “adversarial collaboration,” and for fostering an environment that encourages junior faculty to challenge accepted dogma.
Before coming to Yale, he was an associate professor of management science at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a research associate and lecturer at Princeton’s School of Public & International Affairs, where he worked with Daniel Kahneman. He received his Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, following a master’s degree in Resource Management from Simon Fraser University and a B.S. degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin (Madison).