Announcing the 2025 Thaler-Tversky Research Grant Winners
The Roman Family Center for Decision Research is excited to announce the recipients of the 2025 Thaler-Tversky Independent Research Grant for Emerging Scholars.
Supported by the generosity of Nobel Laureate Professor Richard Thaler in honor of the late Amos Tversky, this annual grant provides up to $2,500 to support innovative, early-stage behavioral science research led by University of Chicago PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.
This year’s recipients are tackling timely questions with bold ideas and rigorous behavioral science methods. Their research explores how AI might reshape hiring practices, how peer norms influence education decisions among disadvantaged youth, and how beliefs about social mobility shape long-term decision-making in low-income communities.
We’re proud to support these emerging scholars: Brian Jabarian, postdoctoral researcher at the Roman Family Center for Decision Research; Haoxuan Liu, PhD student at the Harris School of Public Policy; and Yiyi Wang, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology. Each of them is leading work that has the potential to inform policy, improve lives, and deepen our understanding of human behavior and decision making.
Learn more about their proposed projects below, and join us in congratulating the 2025 Thaler-Tversky Research Grant winners.
Brian Jabarian
Postdoctoral Researcher, Roman Family Center for Decision Research
Faculty Advisor: Alex Imas
Jabarian’s project investigates the impact of replacing human interviewers with AI voice agents in job interviews. In partnership with a hiring company, this natural field experiment explores how AI affects hiring effectiveness, the workplace, and how applicants respond to AI-led interviews—a timely exploration of how AI is reshaping the labor market.
Haoxuan Liu
PhD Student, UChicago Harris School of Public Policy
Faculty Advisors: Ariel Kalil and Marianne Bertrand
Liu’s research examines how peer norms influence educational investment decisions among disadvantaged youth, particularly boys. Using an online survey with 250 recent high school graduates on Prolific, the study uses hypothetical scenarios and discrete choice models to estimate how much future income students are willing to forgo for peer approval in stigmatized academic environments.
Yiyi Wang
Postdoctoral Researcher, UChicago Department of Psychology
Faculty Advisors: Amanda Woodward
Wang’s research explores how strengthening beliefs in social mobility can reduce time discounting—a tendency to favor immediate over delayed rewards—among individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The study also examines whether this effect is mediated by reduced psychological distance to higher socioeconomic status, offering insights into the broader impact of mobility beliefs on decision-making.
- By
- May 30, 2025
- Roman Family Center for Decision Research