Mark Dean

Mark Dean is a Professor in the Department of Economics. His work aims to understand how and why people behave differently to the standard economic model of a fully rational, selfish, stoic decision maker, free from biases, temptations and emotional baggage. As a co-PI of the Cognition and Decision Lab, his focus is on ‘bounded rationality’, or the idea that people have limited cognitive resources they can use to gather information, reason through problems, recall information and so on. Seemingly ‘irrational’ behavior may in fact be an optimal response to these constraints. Recent work in both economics and psychology has suggested that this may be a fruitful approach to improving models of decision making. Mark is also Director of the Columbia Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences.