Ye Li

The Future of Decision Making

ilseu — Thu, 22 May 2025 23:37:40 +0000

The Future of Decision Making ilseu Thu, 05/22/2025 - 16:37 More Blog Posts Josh Haynam | Interact May 02, 2025

In a recent episode of the Quiz Marketing Podcast, Josh Haynam, Co-founder at Interact, sat down with Professor Ye Li, Associate Professor of Management at UC Riverside, to explore the fascinating world of behavioral science and decision-making. What makes this episode so compelling is how it bridges theory and practice, showing listeners why the psychology behind our choices matters not only in research but also in real-world applications like marketing, finance, and even health-related behaviors.

Professor Li and Josh begin by discussing the role of emotions in shaping decisions. Many people assume decision-making is purely rational, but as Li explains, emotions often act as shortcuts that influence how we evaluate options. For example, feelings of gratitude can lead individuals to be more generous with money or more trusting in negotiations. On the other hand, fear or anxiety might cause people to avoid risks even when the logical choice points the other way. Understanding these emotional drivers allows businesses, marketers, and policymakers to anticipate behavior and design strategies that resonate with people on a deeper level.

They then dive into the concept of cognitive shortcuts—or heuristics—and how these mental “rules of thumb” help us navigate daily life. Heuristics are essential because they save time and energy, but they can also introduce bias. Professor Li gives examples of how the framing of a question or the way information is presented can dramatically influence outcomes. Something as simple as asking whether a glass is “half full” versus “half empty” can change how people feel about the same situation. For marketers, this insight is crucial: the phrasing of quiz questions, survey items, or product descriptions can determine whether someone engages positively or feels uncertain.

Another major theme of the episode is personalization. Li highlights how micro-targeting and individual differences shape the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Two people may react very differently to the same message based on their values, past experiences, or personality traits. By paying attention to these nuances, businesses can craft experiences that feel more personal, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Interact’s quiz-based marketing model fits seamlessly into this discussion, as it allows brands to segment audiences and provide tailored recommendations.

The conversation also turns toward the future of decision-making in the age of artificial intelligence. Far from replacing human judgment, Professor Li emphasizes that AI works best when it collaborates with human insight. Algorithms can process massive amounts of data, but humans bring context, creativity, and ethical considerations that machines alone cannot provide. Together, the two create a decision-making process that is not only efficient but also more balanced and humane. For students, entrepreneurs, and professionals alike, this perspective encourages critical thinking about how to leverage AI responsibly while respecting human judgment.

Whether you’re interested in marketing strategy, psychology, or leadership, this podcast episode delivers valuable takeaways. If you’re a marketer, you’ll walk away with new ways to frame questions, design quizzes, and appeal to your audience’s emotions. If you’re a business leader, you’ll gain insights into motivating teams, understanding customer behavior, and making more informed decisions. And for students or lifelong learners, Professor Li provides a clear and engaging introduction to behavioral science that connects academic research with everyday life.

The 48-minute podcast is available on two platforms, making it easy to tune in on your favorite service:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts.

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The Interact podcast explores human behavior and decision making. Interviews with experts delve into the specifics of how humans operate and make choices, with the goal of better understanding what drives people. Josh Haynam, Co-founder at Interact, hosts the podcast. Josh has been studying human behavior through the lens of personality quizzes since 2013 and has seen over 1 billion data points come through the Interact platform. Conversations weave in and out of research studies and anecdotal information derived from experiences of guests and quiz creators.

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‘I Would Take His Class Again in a Heartbeat’

clin246 — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 22:30:01 +0000

‘I Would Take His Class Again in a Heartbeat’ clin246 Fri, 11/18/2022 - 14:30 More Blog Posts Laurie McLaughlin February 27, 2023

“Experiential learning” is a term bandied about in academia, but how does it work in practice? Associate Professor of Management Ye Li at UCR’s School of Business lays out exactly what it looks like within his graduate courses.

“Experiential learning includes online surveys, in-class polls, simulated decisions, games, and group projects,” says Li. “My lectures provide relatable, recent examples to help clarify and cement concepts that will be remembered past finals week.”

Ye Li, associate professor of management

Li also spends a great deal of time guaranteeing each student completes the quarter with a full understanding of the material: “To ensure that students can learn and improve, I provide substantial feedback, usually five to 10 sentences in length,” he says. “To encourage class discussion, which is sometimes hard for those who are anxious or do not speak English fluently, I try to foster a friendly, inclusive environment.

“I emphasize that getting things wrong in a safe environment is important for learning, and failure leads to success even more than does initial success.”

His graduate students appreciate his approach: They presented Li with the 2021-2022 Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence for graduate elective courses, an honor for which he tied in the student voting with Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Professor of Marketing Rami Zwick.

“Dr. Li has one of the most engaging, exciting, informational, and relevant classes I have ever had the pleasure of taking,” wrote one student voter. “He genuinely cares about his students and goes above and beyond to help students stay on track.

“He even takes the time to analyze the data we provide him, and he tells us what the data means. I would take his class again in a heartbeat.”

Selected by Poets & Quants for their 2020 Best 40 Under 40 Business Professors listing, Li’s research is on decision-making and behavioral economics, and he examines the psychology of how and why people make suboptimal decisions. He is particularly interested in the role of time in decision-making.

In the classroom, he says, “How people make decisions is an important set of skills for students to have. So, it is satisfying to see students start to understand the concepts in my class.

“Even better, is when they get in contact years later and tell me how useful the class concepts were for their careers and life decisions.”

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"New" Doesn’t Mean Improved. Why Do We Choose It?

ilseu — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 07:26:34 +0000

"New" Doesn’t Mean Improved. Why Do We Choose It? ilseu Mon, 10/31/2022 - 00:26 More News Darin Estep October 28, 2022

Associate Professor of Management Ye Li

Suppose you had a chance to bid on two identical boxes of chocolates, both with the same expiration date, both stored in the refrigerator. The only difference: One was purchased off the shelf a week ago, the other was purchased today.

If you’re like most people, you would be willing to pay more for the box purchased today. In fact, as Associate Professor of Management Ye Li reports in a recent paper published in the Journal of Retailing, you might be willing to pay 44% more for the “newer” box of chocolates.

In the paper, “Chronological cues and consumers’ preference for mere newness,” Li and his co-author (one of his former students at UCR, Yun Jie, now at the School of Tourism Management in Guangzhou, South China Normal University, Higher Education Mega Center) found ample evidence that consumers are willing to pay a “newness premium” – even when there is no substantial benefit. The findings have implications for retailers and consumers alike.

These were not cases of obvious advantage of newness, such as the freshness of food, or technological advances, or even novelty. In multiple studies that emphasized comparisons of equivalent products, the belief that “newer is better” showed up for otherwise-identical Post-it Notes, books, wireless headphones.

“We actually collected over a hundred studies, although only six made it into the paper,” Li said. “The main effect of people preferring the newer thing is incredibly robust. It shows up significantly every time. And what's more, it's actually really hard to get rid of.”

Lessons for sellers and consumers

One reason retailers might want to get rid of the newness label: Although “new” is one of the most common words used in marketing, it can pose a dilemma.

“Releasing a new product will always make an older product less valuable,” Li said. “If you have a box of something sitting there collecting dust, no one is going to buy it. You do want to advertise things as new, but every time you do that, something else is no longer new.”

In these cases, Li recommends alternative message strategies, such as promoting a “product of the day” – highlighting an item that may not be literally new but worth attention.

Similarly, consumers should be aware of how their preference for “mere newness” influences their decisions, even for products that offer no advantage.

“As a consumer, you really have to actively work against this feeling,” Li said. You really have to try hard to suppress the desire to get the newest thing just because it's new. Ask yourself: Are there actual features that I want?”

This can be a hard habit to break, as noted by an opening quotation in the paper: “Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

A nearly universal trait

Although the quotation, from John Updike’s 1975 novel, “A Month of Sundays,” specifies American habits, this preference is found in cultures around the world, Li said.

Other examples include people being willing to bet more on a coin toss that was made today over one that tossed yesterday. Or paying more for a lottery ticket that was purchased today over one that was bought a week ago.

“There's just some something powerful about the influence of time,” Li said. “A lot of my research is about the influence of time and its effect on decision making. This set of studies is all about the kind of improper influence of time when time doesn't matter.”

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Repetitive Questions in Studies Yield Bad Data

ilseu — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:56:59 +0000

Repetitive Questions in Studies Yield Bad Data ilseu Fri, 01/28/2022 - 13:56 More News Holly Ober } UCR News January 28, 2022

Surveys that ask too many of the same type of question tire respondents and return unreliable data, according to a new UC Riverside-led study.

The study found that people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. Marketers, policymakers, and researchers who rely on long surveys to predict consumer or voter behavior will have more accurate data if they craft surveys designed to elicit reliable, original answers, the researchers suggest.

Ye Li, assistant professor of management

“We wanted to know, is gathering more data in surveys always better, or could asking too many questions lead to respondents providing less useful responses as they adapt to the survey,” said first author Ye Li, a UC Riverside assistant professor of management. “Could this paradoxically lead to asking more questions but getting worse results?”

While it may be tempting to assume more data is always better, the authors wondered if the decision processes respondents use to answer a series of questions might change, especially when those questions use a similar, repetitive format.

The research addressed quantitative surveys of the sort typically used in market research, economics, or public policy research that seek to understand people’s values about certain things. These surveys often ask a large number of structurally similar questions.

Researchers analyzed four experiments that asked respondents to answer questions involving choice and preference.

Respondents in the surveys adapted their decision making as they answer more repetitive, similarly structured choice questions, a process the authors call “adaptation.” This means they processed less information, learned to weigh certain attributes more heavily, or adopted mental shortcuts for combining attributes.

In one of the studies, respondents were asked about their preferences for varying configurations of laptops. They were the sort of questions marketers use to determine if customers are willing to sacrifice a bit of screen size in return for increased storage capacity, for example.

“When you’re asked questions over and over about laptop configurations that vary only slightly, the first two or three times you look at them carefully but after that maybe you just look at one attribute, such as how long the battery lasts. We use shortcuts. Using shortcuts gives you less information if you ask for too much information,” said Li.

While humans are known to adapt to their environment, most methods in behavioral research used to measure preferences have underappreciated this fact.

“In as few as six or eight questions people are already answering in such a way that you’re already worse off if you’re trying to predict real-world behavior,” said Li. “In these surveys if you keep giving people the same types of questions over and over, they start to give the same kinds of answers.”

The findings suggest some tactics that can increase the validity of data while also saving time and money. Process-tracing, a research methodology that tracks not just the quantity of observations but also their quality, can be used to diagnose adaptation, helping to identify when it is a threat to validity. Adaptation could also be reduced or delayed by repeatedly changing the format of the task or adding filler questions or breaks. Finally, the research suggests that to maximize the validity of preference measurement surveys, researchers could use an ensemble of methods, preferably using multiple means of measurement, such as questions that involve choosing between options available at different times, matching questions, and a variety of contexts.

“The tradeoff isn’t always obvious. More data isn’t always better. Be cognizant of the tradeoffs,” said Li. “When your goal is to predict the real world, that’s when it matters.”

Li was joined in the research by Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, Eric J. Johnson, and Olivier Toubia at Columbia University; Daniel Wall at the University of Pennsylvania; and Daniel M. Bartels at the University of Chicago. The paper, “The more you ask, the less you get: When additional questions hurt external validity,” is published in the Journal of Marketing Research and is available to read.

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Header photo: andibreit on Pixabay

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Understanding Why We Do What We Do

ilseu — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 16:55:54 +0000

Understanding Why We Do What We Do ilseu Sun, 12/12/2021 - 08:55 More News Darin Estep January 03, 2022

Professor Ye Li knows why you are checking Twitter instead of working on that project that’s due next week.

Ye Li, assistant professor of management

You might chalk it up to simple procrastination. But Li sees such things through the lens of his research of “intertemporal choices” – and the tradeoffs between immediate and later consequences. As an assistant professor of management in the School of Business, Li helps students understand the implications not just for business but nearly every aspect of life.

“I teach the Judgment and Decision Making course, which is at the intersection of economics and psychology,” he says. “I'm not really looking at the decisions we're supposed to be making, which is what most business classes cover, but rather how do people make decisions – the descriptive reality – and then understanding what mistakes people make.”

Li has a knack for helping students connect these concepts to real life. It was among the reasons he was recognized as one of the “Best 40 Under 40 Professors” in 2020 by Poets & Quants. Li also has been nominated for the UCR Academy of Distinguished Teaching, among other recognitions.

His work has been published in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and Annual Review of Psychology. A paper in the Journal of Marketing Research is forthcoming.

Showing an Interest in Students

Students have praised his enthusiasm for robust class participation. They also have noticed that he makes a point to learn the names of every student in every class he teaches. This reflects an interest in students that Li says comes naturally.

“So, one big thing that I absolutely have to cop to is that I like giving advice. And I especially like it when students come to me for advice,” he says. “That's why, after class, I always stay to see if anyone has additional questions. I actively invite people to my office hours. I love it when someone comes in, and I can just talk their ear off for half an hour and offer them advice.”

That’s important, Li says, especially for the significant number of first-generation students at UCR. Many of these students aren’t familiar with the strategies needed to succeed in higher education. “I try not to be intimidating. So, I think that's a big part of why there's this comfort to come talk to me in the first place,” he says. “And once you reach that connection, you can sense this relief of like, ‘Oh, this professor's a real person. And being able to engage with them one-on-one is not as scary as I expected.’”

An Academic Influence

Li can speak from personal experience about the value of engaging with professors. While an undergrad at California Institute of Technology, he studied and worked with behavioral economics pioneer Colin F. Camerer. This sparked his fascination with the psychology behind economic decision-making.

After earning two bachelor of science degrees (business economics and management and electrical engineering) with highest honors, he went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in behavioral science at the same graduate school where Camerer studied: the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“And so, it really was this happenstance that I discovered this field,” he says. “And I just love it. For example, in my daily life, I love playing board games with my kids and my friends, which is all about making decisions.”

Learning from Perspectives

Because he teaches a behavioral science class, he encourages a lot of class discussion.

“We all have different perspectives. We make mistakes on one side or on the other side of the coin, and I always try to get the student perspectives in class,” he says. “And I tell people, ‘It's not about having the right answer. It's about having your perspective on things. And even if it happens to be wrong, we will all learn from it.’"

In behavioral economics, these perspectives apply to decisions with long-term consequences for business, but they also are evident in everyday life.

Li abounds with examples: Whether you should force yourself to finish a meal at a restaurant just because you paid for it (get the doggy bag); or whether you should go running in the morning, as Li does, even though it’s cold and unpleasant (you’ll feel better later); or whether you should accept $10 now versus $20 in three months (the latter is equivalent to a 400% annualized return).

“When you frame it that way, people are like, ‘OK, well, if you say it like that, then sure. It seems like I should do the long-term thing.’ And so, a lot of my research here obviously applies to business.”

Li encourages students to take a similarly long view, particularly when using their time at UCR.

“For the students who really take advantage of their time at UCR,” he says, “I think they can do really great things.”

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