Lab Directors
Jared Curhan
Gordon Kaufman Professor of Management
Professor of Work and Organization Studies, MIT Sloan School of Management
Faculty Director, MIT Behavioral Research Lab
Vice Chair for Research, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
Jared studies precursors, processes, and long-term consequences of subjective value in negotiation. Subjective value refers to social, emotional, and perceptual outcomes, as contrasted with objective value, which refers to the terms of the deal. Jared also studies the dynamics of negotiation and brainstorming.
Hannah Riley Bowles
Co-director, Center for Public Leadership
Co-director, Women and Public Policy Program
Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School
"Most of my research relates to gender in negotiation, with a particular emphasis on career-related negotiations."
Julian Zlatev
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Julian is interested in the motivations behind why people engage in prosocial behaviors like volunteering and donating to charity. He also does research on trust, decision making, and negotiation.
Faculty Members
Max Bazerman
Jesse Isidor Strauss Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Max has studied negotiator cognition for a very long period of time. He is currently working on how to use the final offer arbitration challenge to make the other side more reasonable.
John Beshears
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Julia Minson
Associate Professor of Public Policy
"My primary research area is behavioral economics, the field that combines insights from psychology and economics to explore individual decision making and market outcomes. I focus on understanding how the financial decisions of households and firms are influenced by the institutional environment in which choices are made."
"I am interested in how people engage with (or avoid) opposing views on important issues. To this end I have developed a scale of receptiveness to opposing views and examined how the mindset that individuals hold with respect to disagreement affects their behaviors and beliefs."
John Carroll
Gordon Kaufman Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Florrie Darwin
Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Christine Exley
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
"I am interested in how people with different professional backgrounds and experiences understand the causes of accidents and develop interventions to improve organizations. This is exemplified in the work of incident investigation teams in various industries, who are essentially negotiating their reality around safety management."
"Negotiating with and learning about negotiation from canine companions."
In recent work, Christine investigates the selection of men and women into negotiations and whether "leaning in" leads to better financial returns. More broadly, Christine focuses on how behavioral motives influence decisions.
Francesca Gino
Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Kessely Hong
Lecturer in Public Policy,
Harvard Kennedy School
Leslie John
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
“I am interested in the psychology explaining our decisions, and the many systematic errors we make in our judgments. Such errors, my research finds, can derail negotiations, make conflicts worse, and lower the quality of our interactions with others. In addition to pointing at problems when it comes to decision making, my research also identifies strategies that can effectively fix them."
"I am interested in exploring strategies low power and low status parties can use to meet their interests through negotiation."
Professor John's research centers on how consumers' behavior and lives are influenced by their interactions with firms and with public policy.
Daniella Kupor
Peter Paul Career Development Professor, Assistant Professor, Boston University
Daniella’s research examines how consumers make decisions, respond to persuasive messages, and perceive risk.
Deepak Malhotra
Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
"I’m currently working on issues related to gun violence, protracted ethno-political conflicts, and negotiations that seem hopeless. My new book is at www.NegotiatingTheImpossible.com."
Mike Norton
Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
"Avoiding answering questions by engaging in dodging and paltering."
Student Members
Hayley Blunden
Doctoral Student in OB, Harvard Business School
Hanne Collins
Research Associate, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School
Brad DeWees
Doctoral Student, Harvard Kennedy School
Hayley Blunden studies the dynamics of interpersonal communication and how the communication strategies employees choose impact their work performance and experiences. She is also interested in virtual work and its consequences for work life, diversity and teamwork.
Hanne is interested in understanding how people navigate the complexities of conversation, especially in the contexts of conflict and disagreement. She hopes to harness this understanding in order to optimize these interactions and help people get the most out of their conversations.
"I'm interested in questions that deal with how people collaborate. Specifically, I research the sources of friction that influence an idea's transfer from one person to another."
Charlie Dorison
Ph.D. candidate, Harvard Kennedy School
Erik Duhaime
Ph.D. candidate, MIT Sloan School of Management
Ximena Garcia-Rada
Doctoral Candidate in Marketing, Harvard Business School
Charlie’s research focuses on how specific emotions influence policy-relevant behavior. These include behavioral economic (e.g., beta-delta discount rates), social psychological (e.g., selective exposure), ethical (e.g., equality vs. efficiency tradeoffs), political (e.g., rally effects), and public health (e.g., smoking) outcomes.
Erik is a behavioral researcher who focuses primarily on decision making in group contexts. Among other things, his research includes projects on when and why people cooperate, and on strategies for mitigating polarization.
Ximena is a Doctoral Candidate in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. She studies consumer behavior in the context of close relationships using laboratory experiments, field studies, and archival data. Specifically, she examines how consumers engage with products and experiences to foster love and trust in their relationships with spouses and families, with the goal of understanding how to help individuals have better relationships and lead happier lives.
Karen Huang
Doctoral Student, Harvard Business School
Ariella Kristal
Doctoral Candidate in OB, Harvard Business School
Masha Ksendzova
Doctoral Student in Marketing, Questrom School of Business, Boston University
Karen's research focuses on negotiation and conflict management, and she is particularly interested in studying how to structure productive discourse over moral issues.
Ariella studies behavioral design. Specifically, she is interested in how environments can be structured to reduce bias in the workplace, in educational settings, in the online context, and in many others.
"I study financial decision-making, valuation under uncertainty, and people's subjective assessment of their prosocial impact."
Taylor Moulton
Ph.D. student, MIT Sloan School of Management
Chiara Trombini
Doctoral Candidate in Business Administration and Management, Bocconi University
WAPPP Fellow
Ke Wang
Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
In his negotiations research, Taylor investigates the interactions between personalities, power, and objective performance. His current research also includes exploring the micro-mechanisms building or eroding subjective value in negotiations and their influence on outcomes. In particular, he is interested in studying the importance of timing in negotiated agreements.
"I study how organizational environments — characterized by competition, stress, “always on” norms and expectations — affect different outcomes within and beyond the organizational context, such as gender biases and discrimination, productivity, performance, and well-being."
Research and Interests: Emotions and motivations underlying decision making.
Mike Yeomans
Postdoctoral Fellow, Economics, Harvard University
Interests: Natural Language Processing