George Wu
John P. and Lillian A. Gould Professor of Behavioral Science
Biography
George Wu studies the psychology of decision making; goal-setting and motivation; and cognitive biases in bargaining and negotiation. Wu's research has been published widely in a number of journals in economics, management science, and psychology, including Cognitive Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Management Science, Psychological Science, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Prof. Wu was also the inaugural faculty director of the Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership.
Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997, Wu was on the faculty of Harvard Business School as an assistant and associate professor in the managerial economics area and then in the negotiation and decision making group. He also has worked as a lecturer at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, Wu worked as a decision analyst at Procter Gamble.
Wu is a Department Editor of Management Science and is on numerous other editorial boards, including Decision Analysis, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Theory and Decision. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude in applied mathematics with a concentration in decision and control in 1985, a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1987, and a PhD in decision sciences in 1991, all from Harvard.
Wu was honored as the 2020 recipient of the Chicago Urban League’s Humanitarian Award. You may read more about the award and the program here. He also received the Class of 2020 Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Selected Publications
With Nathanael Fast and Chip Heath, “Common Ground and Cultural Prominence: How Conversation Strengthens Culture,” Psychological Science (2009).
With Richard Larrick, "Claiming a large slice of a small pie: Asymmetric Disconfirmation in Negotiation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007).
With Uri Gneezy and John List, "The Uncertainty Effect: When a risky prospect is valued less than its worst possible outcome," Quarterly Journal of Economics (2006).
With Cade Massey, "Detecting Regime Shifts: The Causes of Over- and Underreaction," Management Science (2005).
With Richard Gonzalez, "On the Shape of the Probability Weighting Function," Cognitive Psychology (1999).
For a listing of research publications, please visit the university library listing page.
Working Papers
REVISION: Learning to Detect Change
Date Posted:Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:27:00 -0600
People, across a wide range of personal and professional domains, need to detect change accurately. Previous research has documented systematic shortcomings in doing so, in particular, a pattern of over- and under-reaction to indications of change, resulting from a tendency to overweight signals of change at the expense of the environment that produces the signals. This investigation considers whether this pattern persists when participants are given the opportunity to learn. We find that the pattern of system neglect does persist, but that the impact of experience varies greatly across environments -- participants show reliable improvement in some conditions and virtually none in others. We explain this differential learning by formally characterizing environments in terms of the extent to which they: (i) provide consistent feedback; and (ii) tolerate non-optimal behavior. Whereas we find that learning is related to consistent feedback, the stronger -- and perhaps more surprising -- ...
REVISION: Incorporating Behavioral Anomalies in Strategic Models
Date Posted:Thu, 25 Jul 2013 14:23:47 -0500
Behavioral decision researchers have documented a number of anomalies that seem to run counter to established theories of consumer behavior from microeconomics that are often at the core of analytical models in marketing. A natural question therefore is how equilibrium behavior and strategies would change if models were to incorporate these anomalies in a consistent way. In this paper we identify several important and generalizable anomalies that modelers may want to incorporate in their models.
New: Comment on 'Obliquity' (by John Kay)
Date Posted:Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:06:45 -0500
No abstract available.
New: Comment on 'Obliquity' (by John Kay)
Date Posted:Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:29:35 -0600
No abstract available.
REVISION: Learning to Detect Change
Date Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:06:54 -0600
People, across a wide range of personal and professional domains, need to detect change accurately. Previous research has documented systematic shortcomings in doing so, in particular, a pattern of over- and under-reaction to indications of change, resulting from a tendency to overweight signals of change at the expense of the environment that produces the signals. This investigation considers whether this pattern persists when participants are given the opportunity to learn. We find that the ...
REVISION: Learning to Detect Change
Date Posted:Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:24:30 -0600
People, across a wide range of personal and professional domains, need to detect change accurately. Previous research has documented systematic shortcomings in doing so, in particular, a pattern of over- and under-reaction to indications of change, resulting from a tendency to overweight signals of change at the expense of the environment that produces the signals. This investigation considers whether this pattern persists when participants are given the opportunity to learn. We find that the ...
Detecting Regime Shifts: The Causes of Under- and Over-Reaction
Date Posted:Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:32:02 -0500
Many decision makers operate in dynamic environments, in which markets, competitors, and technology change regularly. The ability to detect and respond to these regime shifts is critical for economic success. We conduct three experiments to test how effective individuals are at detecting such regime shifts. Specifically, we investigate when individuals are most likely to under-react to change and when they are most likely to over-react to it. We develop a system-neglect hypothesis: ...
REVISION: Incorporating Behavioral Anomalies in Strategic Models
Date Posted:Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:20:36 -0500
Behavioral decision researchers have documented a number of anomalies that seem to run counter to established theories of consumer behavior from microeconomics that are often at the core of analytical models in marketing. A natural question therefore is how equilibrium behavior and strategies would change if models were to incorporate these anomalies in a consistent way. In this paper we identify several important and generalizable anomalies that modelers may want to incorporate in their models.
New: Claiming a Large Slice of a Small Pie: Asymmetric Disconfirmation in Negotiation
Date Posted:Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:56:24 -0600
Three studies show that negotiators consistently underestimate the size of the bargaining zone in distributive negotiations (the small pie bias) and, by implication, overestimate the share of the surplus they claim (the large slice bias). We explain the results by asymmetric disconfirmation: Negotiators with initial estimates of their counterpart's reservation price that are "inside" the bargaining zone tend to behave consistently with these estimates, which become self-fulfilling, whereas ...
2023 - 2024 Course Schedule
Get Insights from George Wu in Chicago Booth Review
Would You Call Out a Microaggression?
And if you did, what would you actually say, and when and how would you say it?
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How Should You Deliver Negative Feedback?
Chicago Booth behavioral science professor George Wu discusses the art of constructive criticism.
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How Do You Develop Leadership Skills?
Three experts discuss how executives can grow as leaders.
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