George Loewenstein

George Loewenstein (born August 9, 1955) is an American educator and economist who holds the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology chair in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He is regarded as a leader in behavioral economics, which he is credited with helping to co-found, and in neuroeconomics and judgment and decision making. He earned a B.A. in economics at Brandeis University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics at Yale University in 1985 with a thesis titled Expectations and Intertemporal Choice, and he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. He is especially known for work on intertemporal choice and affective forecasting, including hot-cold empathy gaps, the idea that human understanding is state dependent, and for pioneering with Christopher Hsee, Sally Blount and Max Bazerman the study of evaluability and joint-separate preference reversals. He is the son of Sophie Freud and a great-grandson of Sigmund Freud.