I am pleased to announce that Drazen Prelec, Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, has joined the Micronotes Advisory Board.

Professor Prelec's research deals with the psychology and neuroscience of decision making (behavioral economics and neuroeconomics; risky choice, time discounting, self-control, consumer behavior).

Drazen's life's work is absolutely central to Micronotes KulaQ technology insofar as our work stands at the intersection of psychology, mathematics, and commerce. I also see a clear path to commercializing some of Drazen's research to the mutual benefit of consumers and brands alike. I think Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, had it right when he said, Drazen is academic royalty. Long live the king!

I asked Drazen why he joined our advisory board and here's what he said, "The Micronotes system is a real innovation, providing an extremely elegant solution to the problem of matching consumers and purchase incentives. Because participation is voluntary and compensated, the system maximizes the chance that the consumer evaluates the offer in a positive frame of mind. The 3-question targeting system ensures that the offers reach the right destination. Micronotes represents the future of marketing, I am very glad to a part of it."

About Drazen Prelec
Drazen Prelec's research deals with the psychology and neuroscience of decision making (behavioral economics and neuroeconomics; risky choice, time discounting, self-control, consumer behavior). He works both on the development of normative decision theory and the exploration of the empirical failures of that theory, using behavioral and fMRI methods.

A current project on "self-signaling" tries to understand the strange power of non-causal motivation - when individuals favor actions that are diagnostic of good outcomes, even though these actions have little or no causal force. Diagnostic motivation is real, and is probably essential for human self-control. Its cognitive and neural mechanisms are not well understood however.

A second "Bayesian truth serum" project deals with scoring systems for evaluating individual and collective judgment in knowledge domains where no external truth criterion is available. Examples would be long-range forecasts, political or historical inferences, and artistic or legal interpretations. He is developing scoring systems that reward honest judgments, and that can identify truth even when majority opinion is wrong.

Prelec has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1991, and presently holds appointments in the Sloan School, the Economics Department, and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology and AB in applied mathematics from Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has received a number of distinguished research awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.