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Associate Professor of Economics

Keith Chen is an associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management. His research blurs traditional boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of economics, psychology, and biology. In an early project he measured what ex-prisoners lives would have looked like had prison conditions been more or less harsh. In work examining the economic behavior of monkeys, he has shown that monkeys display many of the hallmark biases of human behavior, suggesting that some of our most fundamental biases are evolutionarily ancient. Professor Chen’s most recent work focuses on how people's choices and attitudes are influenced by their past choices, that is how people trade off a desire for cognitive consistence with the ability to adapt to new information.

Selected Articles
"How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-Choice Paradigm" (with J. Risen), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October, 2010 

"The Endowment Effect in Capuchin Monkeys" (with V. Lakshminarayanan and L. Santos), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, December, 2008 

"Modeling a Presidential Prediction Market" (J.E. Ingersoll and E.H. Kaplan), Management Science, August, 2008 

"Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-Based Approach" (with J. Shapiro), American Law and Economic Review, June, 2007

"How Basic are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin-Monkey Trading Behavior" (with V. Lakshminarayanan and L. Santos), Journal of Political Economy, June, 2006

Education
PhD Harvard University, 2003
BS Stanford University, 1998