Behavioral Scientist Professor of Marketing Advisor Volunteer
Claire Tsai Jan is the Corus Entertainment Chair in Communications Strategy, Professor of Marketing, at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Her contributions have been recognized with numerous awards and grants, including the AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Marketing, the Financial Times Academic Research with Real-world Impact Award, and two Outstanding Reviewer Awards from the Journal of Consumer Research. She has received multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC; one ranked 1st of 40 Canada-wide and another ranked 3rd of 83 Canada-wide submissions). She is also a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and the University of Toronto Excellence Award.
Dr. Tsai Jan adopts an applied behavioral economics approach in her research, studying decision-making in areas including marketing, competition, financial decisions, subjective well-being, risk and uncertainty, and overconfidence bias. Her work appears in leading marketing and psychology journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making, and Psychological Science. Her research often receives featured coverage in popular media outlets such as Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, the Globe and Mail, ABC News, CBC News, and Harvard Business Review. To strengthen the training for doctoral students at Rotman, she founded the CREATe lab, which explores inter-disciplinary research in marketing, psychology, economics, and management.
She serves the academic community as an Associate Editor for the Association for Consumer Research and as a member of the Editorial Review Boards for the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. She was also a Celebrity Alumni Speaker at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Prior to her role as Academic Director of the MBA Program, she was the Director of Faculty Recruiting for the Rotman School of Management.
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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 …