Bio
Ido Erev (PhD, 1990, University of North Carolina) is Professor of Behavioral Science and “Women’s Division—ATS Academic Chair” at the Faculty of Data and Decision Science at the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology. He served as vice dean in charge of the MBA program, and the president of the European Association for Decision Making.
Ido has been a visiting research associate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh; a Michael A. Gould fellow at Columbia Business School; a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School; a fellow at the Israel Center of Advanced Studies; a visiting professor at Erasmus School of Economics; a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (now Reichman University); and a research environment professor at Warwick Business School.
His research clarifies the conditions under which wise incentive systems can solve behavioral and social problems. Among the contributions of this research is the discovery of a robust description-experience-gap: People exhibit oversensitivity to rare events when they decide based on a description of the incentive structure, but experience reverses this bias and lead to underweighting of rare events. Comparison of alternative models favors the assumption that people tend to select the option that led to the best outcome in a small sample of similar past experiences. These observations imply that incentives are most effective when they insure that the socially desirable behavior maximizes payoff, and minimizes the probability of regret.
