Suzanne Shu

Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making

"In retirement, people have to make financial decisions that affect the next 30 years. The way we feel now about what we own and what we deserve has, for better or for worse, lasting effects on our financial well-being.”

suzanne.shu@anderson.ucla.edu

Areas of Expertise:

Behavioral Decision Theory
Procastination
Self-Control

About

Biography

Before Professor of Marketing Suzanne Shu found her calling in academia, she had a career in industry. With undergraduate and advanced degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Shu spent five years with Bell Communications Research. Earning an MBA was a logical part of her professional trajectory.

While in business school, Shu realized that the phenomena that had always interested her — behavioral economics, judgment and decision-making, consumer psychology — were organized into formal areas of study. The MBA experience changed her life, she says, and sealed her decision to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where she worked closely with renowned behavioral science expert Richard H. Thaler.

Shu has built a body of work on the topic of future bias, a previously unexplored behavior in which consumers delay consuming a positive asset until some future undefined date. “While most research on intertemporal choice has documented that consumers prefer sooner rewards over later ones,” she says, “my work is among the first to suggest that there may be circumstances where the opposite happens and consumers are willing to wait indefinitely to consume a reward.”

Shu’s numerous published papers address the psychological determinants around concepts like the endowment effect, whereby people ascribe higher value to things just because they own them; and the increasingly hot topic of decumulation, that is, spending savings, pension or other assets accumulated during one’s working life. She studies consumers’ behaviors around purchasing annuities — or, more precisely, why they might not. She says the prospect feels risky to many people, and possibly underlying that feeling is a certain mortality salience, or awareness of one’s inevitable death. “I find that seemingly peripheral psychological constructs, such as fairness or aesthetics, can have a large impact on consumer financial decisions,” says Shu.

“Teaching this material in a business school means students will take it out into the world and apply it,” says Shu, whose oft-cited experiments and collaboration have implications at the level of policy, attracting significant interest from government organizations, financial institutions, and public policy experts.

At a time when the retirement population is larger than ever and Americans are living much longer than in previous generations, Shu’s work also has immediate relevance to consumer financial decision-making. “Most people claim Social Security benefits too early to optimize their income during retirement,” says Shu, co-author of a study revealing important roles for loss aversion and feelings of ownership when making decisions about decumulation. “Why are people doing something that’s not in their economic self-interest? Some people think that they deserve from the system exactly the money they’ve paid into it. This is not really how Social Security works, but the more strongly people feel that benefits come from ‘their’ money contributed through their working years, the sooner they want to claim it, even though it may leave them worse off.”

Education

Ph.D. Behavioral Sciences, 2004, University of Chicago

MBA, 2003, University of Chicago

M.Eng. Electrical Engineering, 1992, Cornell University

B.S. Electrical Engineering, 1990, Cornell University

Published Papers

Sharif, Marissa, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2019). Nudging Persistence after Failure through Emergency Reserves. Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes.

Shu, Suzanne B. and Marissa Sharif. (2018). Occasion Matching for Indulgences. Journal of Marketing Behavior.

Webb, Elizabeth, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2018). The Effect of Perceived Similarity and Categorization on Consumer Sequential Risk-Taking. Journal of Marketing Research.

Shu, Suzanne B., Robert Zeithammer, and John W. Payn. (2018). The Pivotal Role of Fairness: Which Consumers Like Annuities? Financial Planning Review.

Shu, Suzanne B. and Stephen D. Shu. (2018). The Psychology of Decumulation Decisions During Retirement. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Bang, H. Min, Suzanne B. Shu, and Elke Weber. (2018). The Role of Perceived Effectiveness on the Acceptability of Choice Architecture. Behavioural Public Policy.

Webb, Elizabeth, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2017). Is Broad Bracketing Always Better? How Broad Decision Framing Leads to More Optimal Preferences over Repeated Gambles. Judgment and Decision Making.

Sharif, Marissa, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2017). The Benefits of Emergency Reserves: Greater Preference and Persistence for Goals That Have Slack with a Cost. Journal of Marketing Research.

Madrian, Brigitte, Hal E. Hershfield, Abigail B. Sussman, Julian Jamison, Eric J. Johnson, John G. Lynch, Saurabh Bhargava, Jeremy Burke, Scott A. Huettel, Stephan Meier, Scott Rick, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2017). Policy Applications of Behavioral Insights to Household Financial Decision Making. Behavioral Science & Policy.

Shu, Suzanne B., Robert Zeithammer, and John W. Payne . (2016). Consumer Preferences for Annuity Attributes: Beyond Net Present Value. Journal of Marketing Research. (Finalist for 2016 Paul E. Green Award)

Suzanne B. Shu and Kurt Carlson. (2014). When Three Charms but Four Alarms: Identifying the Optimal Number of Claims in Persuasion Settings. Journal of Marketing.

Suzanne B. Shu and Claudia Townsend. (2014). Using Aesthetics and Self-affirmation to Encourage Openness to Risky (and Safe) Choices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

John W. Payne, Namika Sagara, Suzanne B. Shu, Kirstin C. Appelt, and Eric J. Johnson. (2013). Life Expectation: A Constructed Belief? Evidence of a Live To or Die By Framing Effect. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

Eric J. Johnson, Suzanne B. Shu, Benedict G.C. Dellaert, Craig Fox, Daniel G. Goldstein, Gerald Haubl, Richard P. Larrick, Ellen Peters, John W. Payne, David Schkade, Brian Wansink, and Elke U. Weber. (2012). Beyond Nudges: Tools of Choice Architecture. Marketing Letters.

Suzanne B. Shu and Joann Peck. (2011). Perceived Ownership and Affective Reaction: Emotional Attachment Process Variables and the Endowment Effect. Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Shu, Suzanne B. and Ayelet Gneezy. (2010). Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences. Journal of Marketing Research

Claudia Townsend and Suzanne B. Shu. (2010). When and How Aesthetics Influences Financial Decisions. Journal of Consumer Psychology

Peck, Joann, and Suzanne B. Shu. (2009). The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership. Journal of Consumer Research

Suzanne Shu. (2008). Future-biased Search: The Quest for the Ideal. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Kurt Carlson and Suzanne Shu. (2007). The Rule of Three: How the Third Event Signals the Emergence of a Streak. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Daniel Howard, Suzanne Shu, and Roger Kerin. (2007). Reference Price and Scarcity Appeals: A Note on the Use of Multiple Influence Strategies in Retail Newspaper Advertising. Social Influence