Professor Elke U. Weber

Elke U. Weber, Ph.D. is the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business in the Management Division of Columbia Business School and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She is also Director, Center for Research On Environmental Decisions and Director, Center for the Decision Sciences — both at Columbia Business School. Her M.A. and Ph.D. (in Behavior and Decision Analysis, 1984) are from Harvard University.
 
Over the past 20 years, she has held academic positions in the United States (University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Ohio State University) and Europe (London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, University of Fribourg, Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Corporate Management). She spent a year (1992/93) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, half a year (2002) at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Center for Advanced Study) in Berlin, and a year (2007/08) at the Russell Sage Foundation.
 
Elke is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Recently she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decision-making and policy. She is past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and current president of the Society for Neuroeconomics. She has served on several advisory committees of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, related to human dimensions in global change.
 
Elke has edited two major decision journals, is an associate editor of Management Science, and serves or has served on the editorial boards of eight other psychology and policy journals. At Columbia, she founded and co-directs the Center for the Decision Sciences (CDS), which fosters and facilitates cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in the basic and applied decision sciences and recently founded the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which investigates ways of facilitating human adaptation to climate change and climate variability by a combination of laboratory and field studies financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Another recent project, funded by both NSF and NIH, investigates the role of memory processes in preference and choice across the lifespan.
 
She coedited Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making (Cambridge Series on Judgment and Decision Making) and The Drama of the Commons, and coauthored Study Guide for Principles of Statistics, “How Do I Chose Thee? Let me Count the Ways”: A Textual Analysis of Similarities and Differences in Modes of Decision-Making in China and the United States, Decisions from Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice, Beyond a Trait View of Risk-Taking: A Domain-Specific Scale Measuring Risk Perceptions, Expected Benefits, and Perceived-Risk Attitude in German-Speaking Populations, and Risk as Feelings.
 
She is on the Editorial Boards of American Journal of Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Psychological Inquiry, and Psychological Review. She is a fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.
 
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