Behavioral Scientist Professor of Marketing Advisor Volunteer
Claire Tsai is a behavioral scientist interested in uncertainty, risks, and social norms. She is currently a Professor of Marketing at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Claire has worked in financial services in New York, Taipei and Hong Kong. Since 2018, Claire has been the Chief Behavioral Scientist of Tevah Advisory, an innovative consulting company that combines applied behavioral economics and data analytics to solve policy issues and tackle business challenges. Her clients include national and regional governments, NGOs, and corporations in industries including telecom, health care, finance, CPG, and manufacturing. Among others, Claire also sits on Salus Global’s Evidence Advisory Board, a healthcare consultancy formed by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada and the Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada.
Claire speaks to policymakers, managers, and executives on all matters related to behavioral economics, financial decision making, health care, consumer happiness, and consumer experience management.
Claire’s research is on judgments and decision making in the areas of finance, health care, and e-commerce. She has published widely in leading academic journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Organizational Behavior ad Human Decision Making, and Psychological Science and often receives featured coverage in popular media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, Globe and Mail, ABC News, CBC News, and Harvard Business Review. To strengthen the training for doctoral students at Rotman, Claire founded the CREATe lab that explores inter-disciplinary research in marketing, psychology, economics, and management.
email: info@tevahadvisory.com | Download my full CV | Google Scholar
Commentary on the “Alberta is calling” campaign
Data science tells us correlation. Experiments tell us causality.
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Research Highlights
Spending Windfall (“Found”) Time on Hedonic versus Utilitarian Activities (In-Press)
Chung, Jaeyeon, Donald Lehman, Leonard Lee, and Claire I. Tsai. (in alphabetical order) | Journal of Consumer Research | Issue: In Press.
Consumers often gain extra free time unexpectedly. Given the increasing time pressure that consumers experience in their daily lives, it is important to understand how they spend windfall (or unexpected) free time, which we term found time. …
Risky but Alluring: Severe COVID-19 Pandemic Influence Increases Risk Taking (2021)
Tsai, Claire I. and Ying Zeng | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied | Issue: Special issue: Risk Perception, Communication, and Decision Making in the Time of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives to a profound extent. In this research, we examined how the pandemic might have influenced people's general risk attitude in their daily lives. …
Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field Experiment (2021)
Robitaille, Nicole, Nina Mazar, and Claire I. Tsai, Avery M. Haviv, and Elizabeth Hardy | Journal of Marketing | Issue:Special Issue: Better Marketing for a Better World.
Although prior research has advanced our understanding of the drivers of organ donation attitudes and intentions, little is known about how to increase actual registrations within explicit consent systems. Some empirical evidence suggests that costly, labor-intensive educational programs and mass-media campaigns might increase registrations; however …