Drazen Prelec (born 1955 in

Yugoslavia Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...

) is a professor of management science and economics in the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

, and holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well. He is a pioneer in the field of

neuroeconomics Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision-making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to follow through on a plan of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of t ...

. Prelec studied

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemati ...

as an undergraduate at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in experimental psychology, supervised by

Richard Herrnstein Richard Julius Herrnstein (May 20, 1930 – September 13, 1994) was an American psychologist at Harvard University. He was an active researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. Herrnstein was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psycholo ...

and Duncan Luce. He was a Junior Fellow of the

Harvard Society of Fellows The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...

and was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...

. He joined the MIT faculty in 1991. Prelec has made seminal contributions to theories of intertemporal choice, in particular the generalized theory of

hyperbolic discounting In economics, hyperbolic discounting is a time-''inconsistent'' model of delay discounting. It is one of the cornerstones of behavioral economics and its brain-basis is actively being studied by neuroeconomics researchers. According to the disc ...

, as well as to non-expected utility theories, in particular probability weighting functions. He is also responsible for developing the theory of self-signaling. A study by Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people buying tickets to sporting events would be willing to pay significantly higher prices using credit cards than they would for cash purchases. Working in the area of

Wisdom of the crowd The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social infor ...

, Prelec also devised a system, the "Bayesian Truth Serum", for eliciting more truthful answers to polls based on paired questions in which one question of each pair asks about the respondent's own opinion and the other asks the respondent to estimate others' opinions. Prelec is of Croatian descent.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prelec, Drazen 1955 births Harvard University alumni 21st-century American economists Living people MIT Sloan School of Management faculty American people of Croatian descent Scientists from Zagreb