M. Keith Chen

Biography

Keith Chen is a professor of economics with tenure at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of economics, psychology and biology.

In early work examining the evolutionary origins of economic behavior, he has shown that when monkeys are taught to use money, they display many of the hallmark biases of human economic behavior, suggesting that some of our most fundamental biases are evolutionarily ancient. Chen's most recent work focuses on how people's economic choices are influenced by the structure of their language. His work has shown that how a person's language encodes future events influences future-oriented behaviors as diverse as saving, smoking and safe sex.

Chen also consults and advises numerous companies on topics at the intersection of behavioral economics, business strategy and dynamic pricing. Most recently he was the head of economic research for  Uber, where, among other projects, he redesigned Uber's dynamic "surge" pricing model.

At Anderson, Chen teaches the MSBA core course in competitive analytics and Ph.D. behavioral economics.