M. Keith Chen PhD

Keith Chen is a professor of behavioral economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and the Bing (’86) and Alice Liu Yang Endowed Term Chair in Management and Innovation. His research blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries, bringing big data tools to bear on problems at the intersection of economics, psychology, and biology.

Chen’s early work tackled topics that fall outside of traditional economics, such as primate decision-making and the link between language and economic behavior. More recently, his work has studied a unique digital trace data set with precise smartphone location information for millions of anonymous individuals over time. He has produced a stream of work that uses these data to study a variety of issues from the spread of COVID-19 to racial disparities in voting wait times and in police exposure.

Chen also advises numerous companies on topics at the intersection of behavioral economics, business strategy, and dynamic pricing. Most recently, he was the head of economic research for Uber, where, among other projects, he redesigned Uber’s dynamic “surge” pricing model. At Anderson, Chen teaches the MSBA core course in competitive analytics and Ph.D. behavioral economics.