Meet Our New Faculty: David B. Huffman

David B. Huffman | Johnson School

Meet David B. Huffman, one of our newest faculty members to join the Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business. Huffman earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously held academic positions at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Oxford, Swarthmore College, and IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Joining the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management as an Ashley Family Professor in Behavioral Economics in the Strategic and Business Economics group, Huffman’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral, labor, personnel economics, and industrial organization, with a particular focus on how psychological factors and bounded rationality shape worker behavior in the workplace and the strategic decisions of firm managers.

Huffman’s research combines theory, experiments, and field data, and has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies. His work explores the behavioral economics of managerial decision-making, incentive design, cognitive bias, intertemporal choice, and economic preferences across cultures. He has also played a central role in developing globally influential tools for measuring economic preferences.

He has partnered with firms across multiple industries and is affiliated with institutions including IZA Bonn, CESifo Munich, and CHIBE at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also held editorial roles at Management Science, Experimental Economics, and Frontiers in Behavioral Economics.

What is one research paper or business accomplishment, and explain why it’s important to you, your work, or the world at large.

“‘Incentive Complexity, Bounded Rationality, and Effort Provision’ with Johannes Abeler and Collin Raymond. This paper is an important accomplishment for me because it illustrates how academic research can help address an important business problem, in this case designing an incentive scheme that is a win-win for employees and employers.”

What is a current issue in business or business education that you are interested in, and why is it important to you and your work?

“I am currently passionate about understanding whether and how firm managers can have persistently wrong mental models of their economic environment, for example in terms of how customers and competitors respond to price changes. This is important for helping managers improve their own decision making, and also informing them about the potential biases of competitors. I am studying this topic in my current research, through a partnership with a firm that has many managers who are setting prices at a local level.”