Hengchen Dai

Hengchen Dai is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She joined the faculty in 2017 after previously serving at Washington University in St. Louis. As co-director of the UCLA Nudge Unit and a Senior Editor for Organization Science, her work bridges behavioral science with real-world applications in healthcare, education, and business. She employs intrapersonal, interpersonal, and policy-focused frameworks to study motivation, fresh starts, and managerial interventions.

• Education: Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management (2015, University of Pennsylvania); B.S. in Psychology and B.A. in Economics (2010, Peking University)

Her research explores behavioral change mechanisms, particularly how temporal landmarks (e.g., New Year’s resolutions) influence goal pursuit, and how social influence and policy design affect decision-making. She has published in Nature, PNAS, and Academy of Management Journal, with a focus on field experiments over lab-based approaches. Recent work analyzes choice overload in digital platforms, text-based nudges, and urgency in precommitment designs.

Scientific awards include

• Association for Psychological Science Fellow (2024)
• Academy of Management MOC Division Best Paper Award (2024)
• Janet Taylor Spence Award (2023)
• Behavioral Science & Policy Association Best Publication (2023)
• UCLA Hellman Fellows Award (2020)

She teaches executive, fully employed, and full-time MBA programs, emphasizing practical applications of behavioral research. Her work with corporations and healthcare systems demonstrates a commitment to translational behavioral science.