Biography

I’m a fourth year PhD student at Stanford Graduate School of Business, advised by Baba Shiv.

I combine insights from economics, psychology, and neuroscience to study how consumers make value-based decisions. I am interested in how various internal (e.g., physiological states, affective responses in the brain) and external (e.g., choice context, time pressure, alternate courses of action) factors influence our decisions, with a focus on risky decision making and user engagement. In addition to working with large datasets from the field, I rely on a combination of experimental methods, including in-lab behavioral tests, interactive online surveys, text analyses, eye-tracking, physiological measurements, neuroimaging techniques, cross-species approaches, and meta-analytic tools.

Before joining the Marketing PhD program at the Stanford GSB, I received a BSc in Neuroscience with Distinction and a BSc in Economics from Duke University, where I was a University Scholar.

• Rhesus macaques form preferences for brand logos through sex and social status based advertising

  Details PDF Dataset

• A coordinate-based meta-analysis of overlaps in regional specialization and functional connectivity across subjective value and default mode networks

  Details PDF Dataset

I serve as a teaching assistant for various courses at Stanford University:

• OIT276: Data and Decisions (Accelerated)
  • Ali Yurukoglu, Winter 2018
• MKTG240: Marketing Management
  • Christian Wheeler, Winter 2016, Winter 2017, Winter 2018
• MKTG535: Product Launch
  • Jonathan Levav, Spring 2016, Spring 2017
• GSBGEN520: The Frinky Science of the Human Mind
  • Baba Shiv, Autumn 2015

• mya@stanford.edu
• 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
• E-mail for appointment