John Beshears

John Beshears is the Albert J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit, teaching the second-year MBA course "Negotiation." He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining HBS, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Professor Beshears’s primary research area is behavioral economics, the field that combines insights from psychology and economics to understand individual decision making and market outcomes. He collaborates with organizations to study how managers can change the design of decision-making environments — for example by altering the way choices are presented or by adjusting the process that is used to select options from a menu — to influence the decisions of customers and employees. In recent work, he has examined participation in retirement savings plans, household investment decisions, and health-care choices.

The National Institutes of Health, Social Security Administration, FINRA Investor Education Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, TIAA Institute, and National Science Foundation have supported Professor Beshears’s research. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Science, Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; it has also been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Time.

After earning his Ph.D. in business economics at HBS, Professor Beshears was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received an AB in economics from Harvard University.