88: Katherine Milkman: Leading Wharton Professor Using Big Data to Explore Health Behavior

The Health Crossroad with Dr. Doug Elwood and Dr. Tom Elwood

Katherine Milkman is an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research relies heavily on "big data" to document various ways in which individuals systematically deviate from making optimal choices. Her work has paid particular attention to the question of what factors produce self-control failures (e.g., exercising too little or eating too much junk food) and how to reduce the incidence of such failures. Katherine has published in leading periodicals such as Management Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science. She also is an Associate Editor for the Behavioral Economics Department at Management Science and a member of the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Editorial Board. Her work has been featured by media outlets such as The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, NPR, and Harvard Business Review. In 2011, Katherine was recognized as one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets and Quants, and in 2013 she was voted Wharton's "Iron Prof" by the school's MBA students. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in Operations Research and Financial Engineering and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University's joint program in Computer Science and Business. In this interview, Katherine discusses her research in temptation bundling, planning props, and commitment devices among other topics and their implications to improving health behavior.