Xiaoxue Sherry Gao

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the Cleve E. Willis Experimental Economics Laboratory. I am a behavioral and experimental economist. I develop methods for measuring individual risk and time preferences and beliefs, and apply them to welfare evaluation and to consequential decisions in health and in personal finance.

Xiaoxue Sherry Gao

Department of Resource Economics

College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

University of Massachusetts Amherst

217B Stockbridge Hall

80 Campus Center Way, Amherst, MA 01003

Email: sherrygao@resecon.umass.edu

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Research

With Glenn W. Harrison and Rusty Tchernis, I developed a Bayesian hierarchical approach to estimating risk preferences at the individual level that makes behavioral welfare evaluation feasible one person at a time; the paper, published in Experimental Economics, received the journal's Editors' Prize for the best paper published in 2023. Follow-up work examines when demographic information should enter the prior (Risks, 2026) and lets each individual combine expected utility and rank-dependent models (under review at the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty).

In health economics, I study how beliefs are measured and how they drive vaccination decisions: an incentive-compatible procedure for eliciting health beliefs (PLOS ONE, 2026), a laboratory experiment showing that information campaigns can backfire when they ignore where people's beliefs start, and an experiment on partisan differences in responses to COVID-19 vaccine information (PLOS ONE, 2026). Current projects include AI decision aids built on individual preference estimates, the welfare economics of sports parlay betting among young adults, wealth effects on measured time preferences, pedestrian risk perception with civil engineers, and shared decision-making tools for heavy menstrual bleeding treatment with clinicians at UMass Chan Medical School. Publications and working papers are on the Research page.

Teaching and advising

At UMass Amherst I teach Decision Analysis (ResEcon 313) and Experimental Economics (ResEcon 440), an undergraduate elective with hands-on sessions in the Willis Lab, and I have taught Applied Microeconomic Theory II (ResEcon 712), the second course in the graduate microeconomics sequence. At Georgia State University, where I earned my PhD in Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, I taught The Global Economy and Introduction to Game Theory.

I also advise and mentor students at every level: I have served on four PhD dissertation committees, with graduates now in tenure-track positions at the City College of New York, Oklahoma State University and Baylor University, and I have supervised master's research projects and undergraduate research assistants and, as co-director of the Willis Lab, worked with graduate students on building its subject pool. I welcome inquiries from students interested in experimental and behavioral economics. Syllabi and my teaching philosophy are on the Teaching page.

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