Lavin Exclusive Speaker
How can we break bad habits and stick to tough goals? How do we learn self-control in an age of distraction? An expert in big data and behavioral economics, Katherine Milkman studies the ways we deviate from optimal choices—and how human decision-making can be improved. In her engaging talks, she offers accessible insights into how we can encourage good choices: in ourselves, our customers, and our employees.
Katherine Milkman is working to make good habits stick. A tenured professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, her work is addressing virtually every social ill that confronts humanity, all through the lens of choice, good habits, and goal-setting. Whether we want to adopt a better diet or save more money for retirement, study better for exams or keep up with exercise, it’s hard to make tough decisions.
To Milkman—one of the world’s top 40 business school professors under 40 (Poets and Quants)—we’re beset by failures of self-control, at the individual and group level. This explains why “forty percent of premature deaths are linked to habits,” she says. But through choice architecture and innovative nudge initiatives, she’s helping individuals, customers, and employees make better decisions. In other words, her data-driven research focuses on what produces self-control failures, and how we can reduce them, with particular emphasis on “temptation bundling,” or grouping positive choices with rewards. “If you repeatedly reward good behavior and pair it with memorable cues,” she says, “positive routines become instinctual.”
Today, Milkman is transforming behavioral change with a specific, revolutionary project. In collaboration with fellow U Penn faculty member (and Lavin speaker) Angela Duckworth, she’s spearheading the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good initiative. Together, they’re working on making good but difficult decisions both rewarding and easier to make. Milkman is also host of the fascinating podcast Choiceology, in which she explores the human lessons of behavioral economics, exposing the psychological traps that lead to expensive mistakes.
Milkman holds the Evan C Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching, as well as a secondary appointment at UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine. She is the recipient of an early career award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, and has published dozens of articles in social science journals that have reached a wide audience through op-eds in The New York Times and regular coverage in and contributions to such outlets as NPR, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. Her work was also the focus of an entertaining Freakonomics podcast entitled, “When Willpower Isn’t Enough.” Milkman has received multiple excellence in teaching awards at Wharton, and was voted Wharton’s “Iron Prof” in 2013 by the school’s MBA students. She has worked with numerous companies on research and/or consulting, including the American Red Cross and Google.
She holds a B.S.E. in Operations Research & Financial Engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Information, Technology & Management from Harvard University’s Business School.