Uri Gneezy


Uri Hezkia Gneezy is the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics and Professor of Economics & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management.

Education and career

Gneezy studied economics at Tel Aviv University, where he obtained a BA degree and graduated with honors. He later got his MA and PhD at the CentER for Economic Research at Tilburg University in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Gneezy, who frequently contributes to the Freakonomics website, is known for designing simple, clever experiments to demonstrate behavioral phenomena that open up new research directions in behavioral economics. Examples include his work on when and how incentives work, deception, gender differences in competitiveness, and behavioral pricing. Gneezy and coauthor John A. List have published a book on the hidden motives and undiscovered economics of everyday life, titled "The Why Axis."
In 2014, Gneezy cofounded Gneezy Consulting, a business consultation company that specializes in behavioral economics.
Before joining the Rady School, Gneezy was a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Haifa University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making.

Research

Since receiving his Ph.D. from Tilburg University in 1997, Gneezy has started a few lines of research that have become part of the agenda in behavioral economics. Examples include papers on gender differences, discrimination, deception, the uncertainty effect, and the counter-productivity of incentives. In his research, he typically starts with new and original questions the literature has not yet investigated, and addresses them with simple empirical demonstrations of powerful psychological effects. Rather than testing theories, Gneezy begins with the demonstration of behavioral effect.

Personal life

Gneezy currently resides in San Diego, California, with his wife and three children.

Selected publications

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