Robert Mislavsky

Doctoral Candidate

Contact Information

Primary Email:
rmisl@wharton.upenn.edu

office Address:
527.8 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: consumer behavior, judgment and decision making, risk perception

Links: CV

Overview

Rob Mislavsky is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Decision Processes group.

Before joining Wharton, Rob worked in the commercial advisory group at PwC. He also completed a bachelor’s degree in finance and operations management from the University of Maryland and an MBA in marketing and product development from Carnegie Mellon University.

His research primarily focuses on how consumers react to firms introducing risk and uncertainty into everyday transactions. For example, he has studied how the mechanism that introduces uncertainty to a transaction may have a larger impact on valuations than the uncertainty itself (Mislavsky & Simonsohn, in press, Management Science), whether consumers judge random assignment to policies (as is done in field experiments) differently than non-random assignment to the same policies (Mislavsky, Dietvorst, & Simonsohn, revise and resubmit, Marketing Science), and how consumers aggregate verbal probability forecasts differently than they do equivalent numeric probability forecasts (Mislavsky & Gaertig, work in progress).

Rob’s other stream of research examines what motivates people to engage in “should” behaviors, such as exercising (Beshears, Lee, Milkman, & Mislavsky, in prep) or donating to charity (Zwebner, Mislavsky, & Small, work in progress).

Research

John Beshears, Hae Nim (Sunny) Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, Jessica Wisdom (2020), Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization, Management Science, 67 (7), pp. 4139-4171. Abstract
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives—paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated fewer gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among subgroups that were experimentally induced to exercise at similar rates during our intervention, recipients of routine incentives exhibited a larger decrease in exercise after the intervention than recipients of flexible incentives.
Robert Mislavsky and Celia Gaertig (Working), 60% + 60% = 60%, but Likely + Likely = Very Likely. Abstract
How do we combine others’ probability forecasts? Prior research has shown that when advisors provide numeric forecasts, people typically average them. For example, if two advisors think an event has a 60% chance of occurring, people also believe it has a 60% chance (more or less). However, what happens if two advisors say that an event is “likely” or “probable”? In four studies, we find that people combine verbal forecasts additively, making their forecasts more extreme than each advisor’s forecast. For example, if two advisors say something is “likely,” people believe that it is “very likely.”
Robert Mislavsky and Uri Simonsohn (Forthcoming), When Risk is Weird: Unexplained Transaction Features Lower Valuations. Abstract
We define transactions as weird when they include unexplained features, that is, features not implicitly, explicitly, or self-evidently justified, and propose that people are averse to weird transactions. In six experiments, we show that risky options used in previous research paradigms often attained uncertainty via adding an unexplained transaction feature (e.g., purchasing a coin flip or lottery), and behavior that appears to reflect risk aversion could instead reflect an aversion to weird transactions. Specifically, willingness to pay drops just as much when adding risk to a transaction as when adding unexplained features. Holding transaction features constant, adding additional risk does not further reduce willingness to pay. We interpret our work as generalizing ambiguity aversion to riskless choice.
Robert Mislavsky, Berkeley Dietvorst, Uri Simonsohn (Under Review), Critical Condition: People Only Object to Corporate Experiments if They Object to a Condition. Abstract
Why have companies faced a backlash for running experiments? Academics and pundits have argued that it is because the public finds corporate experimentation objectionable. In this paper we investigate “experiment aversion,” finding evidence that, if anything, experiments are rated more highly than the least acceptable policies that they contain. In six studies participants evaluated the acceptability of either corporate policy changes or of experiments testing those policy changes. When all policy changes were deemed acceptable, so was the experiment, even when it involved deception, unequal outcomes, and lack of consent. When a policy change was unacceptable, the experiment that included it was deemed less unacceptable. Experiments are not unpopular, unpopular policies are unpopular.
Brad Bitterly, Robert Mislavsky, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, “Dueling with Desire: A Synthesis of Past Research on Want/Should Conflict”. In, edited by, (2015), pp. 244-264

Activity

Latest Research

John Beshears, Hae Nim (Sunny) Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, Jessica Wisdom (2020), Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization, Management Science, 67 (7), pp. 4139-4171.

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