Nina Mazar
Professor, Marketing
I’m a behavioral scientist dedicated to advancing the science and practice of behavior change, focusing on topics ranging from the influence of technology on human decision making and consumer behavior to ethical decision making to social impact. I am Co-PI of the Platform Governance Research LAB, generously sponsored by National Science Foundation grant SaTC #2217770.
I am part of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2023, was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (Poets&Quants, 2014), am a former president of the academic Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and co-founded BEworks, now part of the kyu collective.
In a nutshell, I investigate how cues in the environment as well as interactions with technology (i.e. AI), affect how we think about products, prices, donations, work, information sharing, advice taking, and in particular, ethics, and their implications for business, policy, and societal welfare. My research topics range from irrational attractions to free products to the paradoxes of green behavior, organ and blood donations, tax compliance, debt management, health equity, countering misinformation, and adoption and consequences of AI-products.
I was nominated for the SSHRC Aurora Prize for “Outstanding New Researcher” in Canada, and am the recipient of several teaching and research awards, including the William F. O’Dell Award of AMA’s Journal of Marketing Research (for having made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice), and, most recently, the 2022 Best Book of the Year award for my co-edited Book “Behavioral Science in the Wild (Habit Weekly) and the 2023 Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award (for my co-authored work on nudging organ donor registrations).
I have published my research in leading academic journals like the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Psychological Sciences, Review of Economic Studies, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Popular accounts of my work have appeared among others on NPR, BBC, in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Harvard Business Review, and my research has been featured in various New York Times bestsellers including Drive by Daniel Pink as well as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.
Public engagements/talks include the Canada Revenue Agency, European Commission, Department of State, World Bank, OECD, Toyota, Google Ventures, and IDEO.
Most recently, I acted as the senior behavioral scientist of the World Bank’s behavioral insights team (eMBeD) in Washington DC, which I helped initiate and I co-directed the Behavioral Economics in Action research center at Rotman (BEAR) – the first academic center in Canada dedicated to applying behavioral science to policy and organizations — as well as the Susilo Institute for Ethics in the Global Economy at Questrom.
I have been serving as advisor on boards of various governments and organizations. Past engagements include the Privy Council Office Innovation Hub for Behavioral Economics in Canada, the Austrian Minister for Family and Youth, Irrational Labs in San Francisco, CA, and the Martin Prosperity Institute (directed by Roger Martin, named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50).
Before joining academia I worked with a spin-off of KPMG as a management consultant in Germany. Before becoming a professor, I was a post-doctoral associate and lecturer in marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab eRationality Group. I’m also an alumni of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).
Education
PhD equivalent (Dr. rer. pol.), Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 2003
Selected Research Presentations
Mazar, N. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certifications on Misinformation, Marketing Seminar Speaker Series, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 2025
Mazar, N. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certifications on Misinformation, JDM Winter Conference, Snowbird, Utah, 2025
Swapneel, M. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Improving Economic Welfare in Reputation-based Marketplaces with Truth Warrants, Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), Bangkok, Thailand, 2024
Nichols, A. , Parker, T. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), Bangkok, Thailand, 2024
Mehta, S. , Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Improving Governance of Digital Platforms with Truth Warrants, MarkTech Conference, Columbia University, NYC, NY, 2024
Mehta, S. , Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Market Design Interventions for Safer Agentic AI, 2024 Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Business Analytics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2024
Nichols, A. , Parker, T. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, SJDM Conference, NYC, NY, 2024
Mazar, N. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Seminar Speaker, Marketing Department, Cox School of Business, SMU, Dallas, TX, 2024
Mazar, N. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Seminar Speaker, Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, 2024
Nichols, A. , Parker, T. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Psychology of Technology Conference, Boston University, Boston, MA, 2024
Lee, C. , Mazar, N. , Morewedge, C. Why Context Influences Choice More than Willingness to Pay, Association for Consumer Research Conference, Paris, France, 2024
Nichols, A. , Parker, T. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2024
Mehta, S. , Wiedswang, S. , Yang, Z. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Improving the Governance of Digital Platforms with Interactive Marketplace Experiments, International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2024
Nichols, A. , Parker, T. , Pennycook, G. , Rand, D. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Platform Strategy Research Symposium, Boston University, Boston, MA, 2024
Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation, Human Dynamics group, Media Lab, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2024
Mehta, S. , Mazar, N. Sakhi – Chatbot experiment in Bangladesh for health literacy, eMBeD, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 2024
Robitaille, N. , House, J. , Mazar, N. Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment, BI-Org Final Conference, University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, Toronto, 2024
Nichols, A. , Mazar, N. , Van Alstyne, M. Truth is Warranted: The Role of Self- Certification in Information Markets, Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference (FESC), Yale University, CT, 2024
Mazar, N. Scaling and Translating Insights from Behavioral Science in the Wild, Decision Sciences Collaborative Forum 2024, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 2024
Altintas, O. , Seidmann, A. , Gu, B. , Mazar, N. The Effects of Interpretable Artificial Intelligence on Repeated Managerial Decisions-Making under Uncertainty, Proceedings of the 57th Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Honolulu, HI, 2024
Altintas, O. , Seidmann, A. , Gu, B. , Mazar, N. The Effect of Interpretable AI on Repetitive Managerial Decision-Making under Uncertainty, Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, India, 2023
Altintas, O. , Seidmann, A. , Gu, B. , Mazar, N. The Effects of Interpretable Artificial Intelligence on Repeated Managerial Decisions-Making under Uncertainty, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, 2023
Publications
Lee, C., Mazar, N., Morewedge, C. (In Press). “Why Context Influences Preferences Elicited with Willingness to Pay Less Than Preferences Elicited with Choice”, Management science
Duckworth, A., Ko, A., Milkman, K., Kay, J., Dimant, E., Gromet, D., Halpern, A., Jung, Y., Paxson, M., Zumaran, R., Berman, R., Brody, I., Camerer, C., Canning, E., Dai, H., Gallo, M., Hershfield, H., Hilchey, M., Kalil, A., Kroeper, K., Lyon, A., Manning, B., Mazar, N., Michelini, M., Mayer, S., Murphy, M., Oreopoulos, P., Parker, S., Rondina, R., Soman, D., Bulte, C. (2025). “A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122 (13)
Zickfeld, J., Scigala, K., Elbaek, C., Michael, J., Tonnesen, M., Levy, G., Ayal, S., Thielmann, I., Nockur, L., Peer, E., Capraro, V., Barkan, R., Bo, S., Bahnik, S., Nosenzo, D., Hertwig, R., Mazar, N., Weiss, A., Koessler, A., Montal-Rosenberg, R., Hafenbradl, S., Nielsen, Y., Kanngiesser, P., Schindler, S., Gerlach, P., Kobis, N., Jacquemet, N., Vranka, M., Ariely, D., Martuza, J., Feldman, Y., Bialek, M., Woike, J., Rahwan, Z., Seidl, A., Chou, E., Kajackaite, A., Schudy, S., Glogowsky, U., Czarna, A., Pfattheicher, S., Mitkidis, P. (2025). “Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content”, NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, 9 (1)
Mazar, N., Apfelbaum, E. (2024). “From Disney Magic to Entrepreneurial Dreams: A BU Alum’s Journey.”, Insights@Questrom
House, J., Lacetera, N., Macis, M., Mazar, N. (2024). “Nudging the Nudger: Performance Feedback and Organ Donor Registrations”, Journal of Health Economics, 97 (September), 102914-102914
Pe’er, E., Mazar, N., Feldman, Y., Ariely, D. (2024). “How pledges reduce dishonesty: The role of involvement and identification.”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 113 (July), 104614-104614
Boz, H., Bahrami, M., Balcisoy, S., Bozkaya, B., Mazar, N., Nichols, A., Pentland, A. (2024). “Investigating neighborhood adaptability using mobility networks: a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic”, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11:397 1-11
Mazar, N., Elbaek, C., Mitkidis, P. (2023). “Reply to Bas et al.: The difference between a genuine tendency and a context-specific response.”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 120 (50), e2318010120-e2318010120
Yang, S., Yeung, M., Barr, N., Lee, C., Malik, W., Mazar, N., Soman, D., Thomson, D. (2023). “The elements of context”, Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman (BEAR) Report series
Mazar, N., Elbaek, C., Mitkidis, P. (2023). “Experiment aversion does not appear to generalize”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 120 (16)
Madan, S., Johar, G., Berger, J., Chandon, P., Chandy, R., Hamilton, R., John, L., Labroo, A., Liu, P., Lynch, J., Mazar, N., Mead, N., Mittal, V., Moorman, C., Norton, M., Roberts, J., Soman, D., Viswanathan, M., White, K. (2023). “Reaching for rigor and relevance: better marketing research for a better world”, MARKETING LETTERS, 34 (1), 1-12
Soman, D., Mazar, N. (2022). “Six Prescriptions for Applied Behavioral Science as It Comes of Age”, Behavioral Scientist
Mazar, N., Soman, D. (2022). “Behavioral Science in the Wild”, University of Toronto Press
Milkman, K., Gandhi, L., Patel, M., Graci, H., Gromet, D., Ho, H., Kay, J., Lee, T., Rothschild, J., Bogard, J., Brody, I., Chabris, C., Chang, E., Chapman, G., Dannals, J., Goldstein, N., Goren, A., Hershfield, H., Hirsch, A., Hmurovic, J., Horn, S., Karlan, D., Kristal, A., Lamberton, C., Meyer, M., Oakes, A., Schweitzer, M., Shermohammed, M., Talloen, J., Warren, C., Whillans, A., Yadav, K., Zlatev, J., Berman, R., Evans, C., Ladhania, R., Ludwig, J., Mazar, N., Mullainathan, S., Snider, C., Spiess, J., Tsukayama, E., Ungar, L., van den Bulte, C., Volpp, K., Duckworth, A. (2022). “A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies”, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 119 (6)
Mazar, N. (2022). “Offering facts can improve COVID vaccine uptake”, NATURE, 606 (7914), 471-472
Hertwig, R., Mazar, N. (2022). “Toward a taxonomy and review of honesty interventions”, CURRENT OPINION IN PSYCHOLOGY, 47
Mazar, N., Robitaille, N., House, J. (2021). “Are Repeat Nudges Effective? For Tardy Tax Filers, It Seems So”, Behavioral Scientist
Mazar, N., Robitaille, N., House, J. (2021). “Do Behavioral Nudges Work on Organizations?”, Harvard Business Review
Mazar, N. (2021). “How Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives can Benefit from Behavioral Science”, BEworks Choice Architecture Report 2021
Robitaille, N., Mazar, N., Tsai, C., Haviv, A., Hardy, E. (2021). “Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment”, JOURNAL OF MARKETING, 85 (3), 168-183
Gauri, V., Jamison, J., Mazar, N., Ozier, O. (2021). “Motivating bureaucrats through social recognition: External validity?A tale of two states*”, ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES, 163 117-131
Robitaille, N., House, J., Mazar, N. (2021). “Effectiveness of Planning Prompts on Organizations’ Likelihood to File Their Overdue Taxes: A Multi-Wave Field Experiment”, MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, 67 (7), 4327-4340