Dr. Rory M. Waisman

Beyond the Workplace

My Hobbies: 

I am an experimental behavioral scientist, educator, and marketer. I study consumer judgment and decision making with a focus on choice architecture, preference construction, and maladaptive decision making. My research examines how the conditions under which consumers encode, retrieve, and process mental representations of their world influence their judgments, preferences, and decisions. In my primary program of research, I investigate the influence of choice architecture interventions on downstream preference and behavior. In a second stream of research I shed light on how cues from the environment and previous experiences influence the mental representations that guide consumption appraisal and maladaptive behavior. This work illuminates how cognitive biases implicated in gambling, investing, and consumer spending contexts are influenced by normatively irrelevant mental representations. I aim to advance theory and to connect it with marketplace realities to reveal practical implications for consumers, firms, and policy makers. My research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Consumer Psychology Review, Behavior Research Methods, and Methodological Innovations.