About me
I am an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at Duke Kunshan University. I received my Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis and my B.A. in Economics and Psychology from Reed College.
My research focuses on age-related differences in decision-making, and in particular on discounting (i.e., the decrease in the subjective value of an outcome as the delay to its receipt increases or its likelihood decreases). Discounting plays a critical role in financial and health-related decisions, which often involve outcomes that are delayed, probabilistic, or both.
Such decisions are often more complicated than the choices usually studied in the laboratory, which are typically between immediate and delayed outcomes or between certain and probabilistic ones. One goal of my current research is to examine decision-making in more complicated situations, as when outcomes are both delayed and probabilistic or involve both gains and losses. A second goal is to identify the sources of age-related differences in decision-making and, in particular, the role played by people’s financial circumstances.