Beijing, China
Psychology of judgment and decision making Human factors in information processing and decision strategies Statistics, psychometrics, and quantitative modeling Mathematical models of economic and social judgment Specialties: Experiments with human subjects, statistics, mathematical modeling, online-survey
Behavioral Economics
My work in Columbia University mainly involves conducting research on human decision making over the life span. I mainly use online surveys and web-based experiments to address both the behavioral side and the cognitive side of decision making, and compare performances between younger and older populations. The behavioral-economic end addresses how people evaluate risks (social, ethical, financial, health and recreational), how they trade off between monetary value and time, and how they estimate costs. The cognitive end addresses how different cognitive functions interact with decision making abilities. I use cognitive tests to investigate memory functions, processing speed, crystallized and fluid intelligence. I am responsible for the experimental design and implementation, data analysis, and writing reports for the studies.
I worked as a research fellow in the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) in MPI-berlin for two years. My work focuses on cognitive processes of reasoning and decision making, ranging from building mathematical models to heuristic functions. My research is both theoretically innovative and empirically validated. I really enjoyed the two years in MPI, and my collaborations with colleagues there. The experience broadens my research interests to a much more applied field, including financial and medical decision making.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from University of Warwick, UK, with a thesis titled "Economic Psychophysics: theory and applications". In the thesis, I developed a mathematical model that addresses how people sample information to form a comparitive context, and how they evaluate magnitudes based on a given context (where I mostly focus on the variance and skewness of the context). This theoretical model was applied in experimental work, where I investigated how people evaluate pay satisfaction in a work place (in labor economics context); how people evaluate prices (in a marketing context); and used the theory to address how people evaluate probabilities (in a theoretical context that provides one explanation for the widely used probability weighting function in Prospect Theory). Parts of the thesis are published in labor economic journals and cognitive science journals.