Keith Chen

Keith Chen is a professor of behavioral economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and holds the Bing and Alice Liu Yang Endowed Chair in Management and Innovation. His research sits at the intersection of economics, psychology, and decision science to examine consumer choice, cognitive biases, pricing, and consumer welfare. He has studied markets including technology, automotive, healthcare, and education.

Professor Chen has extensive experience using experimental, observational, and large-scale behavioral data to evaluate how individuals actually respond to information, incentives, and constraints. His work has combined smartphone-location and vehicle-registration data to examine how dealership visits help car buyers assess product fit and how travel distance affects their searches.

Professor Chen advises companies on behavioral economics, business strategy, and pricing. As head of Economic Research at Uber, he designed the company’s “surge” pricing model. Professor Chen has published extensively in top economics and law journals. He has presented his research to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other government and legal audiences and coauthored an amicus curiae brief to the California Supreme Court. He has served as a testifying and consulting expert in federal consumer protection and antitrust matters involving issues of consumer behavior and harm, pricing, and digital platforms.

Professor Chen may be contacted by email through Kristina Shampanier, a managing director at BRG.