Profile
Alex Imas
Assistant Professor
Chicago Booth
Alex Imas examines how people learn and make decisions over time. Most recently, he studied how incorrect beliefs feed into and propagate discrimination. Using formal theory and empirics, he shows that the evolution of discrimination—whether it is mitigated or exacerbated—depends critically on the extent of bias in the evaluation process and people’s awareness of it. In another line of research, he examined the decisions of expert and non-expert investors, showing that experienced professionals can be as biased as non-experts.
He received the New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award. He was included in Pacific Standard’s 30 Top Thinkers under 30. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Management Science.
Imas was born in Bender, Moldova. He earned a BA in economics from Northwestern University and received his PhD in economics from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to graduate school, he helped found a start-up and co-authored several patents as part of its intellectual property strategy. Most recently, he was the William S. Dietrich II Assistant Professor in Behavioral Economics at Carnegie Mellon University.