Samuel Hirshman brings research expertise on decision-making during uncertainty
Samuel Hirshman | Assistant Professor | Dyson School
Meet Samuel Hirshman, one of our newest faculty members to join the Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business. Hirshman earned his Ph.D. in behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Prior to joining the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Hirshman taught economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and a postdoc at The University of Colorado Leeds School of Business.
His research in behavioral economics sits at the intersection of marketing, economics and psychology, and focuses on how people make decisions and judgments during uncertainty, how they learn about probabilities, and how differences across people in their approach to uncertainty interacts with policy. Hirshman says that he uses a broad range of data sources including experiments and surveys collected online and administrative data sources like school grades and bank spending data to clearly examine both underlying mechanisms for judgments and decisions and real-world relevance.
What is a research paper of yours that is important to you, your work, or the world at large?
“My paper Ownership, Learning, and Beliefs looks at how owning something affects the way people learn about how good it is. We show that people overreact to information about goods that they own, becoming too optimistic if they see good news and too pessimistic if they see bad news. The paper is one of my favorites because we use online experiments to clearly identify the effect and that attention is the mechanism driving it, but also pair with survey data to show that our finds matter for a broader population (in this case, stock owners) than the online experiments spoke to.”
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’m really interested in the interaction between firms and consumers when consumers have belief biases or heterogeneity in risk preferences. What kinds of choices do firms provide to consumers? How do consumers’ differences in preferences and beliefs affect the decisions they make? Are there predictable populations where certain kinds of options would be more vs. less successful for both firms and consumers? At Cornell, I am looking forward to pursing these questions more.”