Behavioral Economics and Decision Making Lab

BEDLab End of Year Party

June 12, 2025

We celebrated our last meeting of the academic year with a mini party featuring awards, lab photo (sadly missing many people), some light board games, snacks, and delicious pizza from UPC.

MVP (Overall, cross-project impact on research quality and lab culture) - Iva Mihajlovic

Research Star - Marah Salloum

MIP (Most Improved Player) - Win Thant Tin Han

RotY (Rookie of the Year) - Milena Guidotti

Lifetime Achievement Award - Haoyang (Sam) Fan

AotY (Analyst of the Year) - Julian Lu

Insight Amplifier Award (best contributions to discussions) - Raghav Rapaka

We also bid a fond farewell to graduating lab members: Soumya Agarwal, Keerthi Chidella, Jhanvi Dyavarshetty, Haoyang (Sam) Fan, Win Thant Tin Han, Julian Lu, Chandrahaas Mariserla, Iva Mihajlovic, Victor Nguyen, Marah Salloum, Arshleen Toor, Sean Veve. You're always welcome back in BEDLab meetings whenever you're in town, and even better, you can always present on how you've used been using your BEDLab skills in "real life."

P.S. Thanks to Iva and Marah, BEDLab now has a mascot, Bo the BEDLab bear!

Marah publishes paper in UCR Undergraduate Research Journal

June 6, 2025

After three rounds of reviews, Marah's paper based on her Honors Capstone made it into this year's UCR Undergraduate Research Journal. The official journal unveiling was today and there was a little party for it. Here's a link to the paper: Anxiety Effects on Decision Making with College Students

Marah and Win receive Honors Cords

June 5, 2025

Professor Li had the honor of "cording" Marah and Win at today's Honors Convocation. It was like a mini-graduation for the Honors Program students to commemorate the end of two years of hard work on their capstones. There was even a weirdly long magic show from a UCR alum...

Prof. Li receives Innovative Teaching Award

May 28, 2025

Professor Li received the UCR Academy of Distinguished Teaching's Innovative Teaching Award for 2025. XCITE made a video about this here.

Win receives Best Presentation Award

May 13, 2025

Win's research presentation was selected as the best in the Bourns College of Engineering! In recognition of this honor, Win and Prof Li were invited to join the Vice Provost and Dean, Louie Rodriguez, and the Center for Undergraduate Research & Engaged Learning (CUREL) team for a celebration luncheon.

Western Psychological Association

May 1, 2025

At this year's Western Psychological Association in Las Vegas, Iva and Marah presented posters. They did a great job representing BEDLab at WPA!

Marah presented poster on Anxiety Effects on College Student Decision Making
Iva presented poster on From Candy to Carrots: Can Health-Promoting Tags Lead to Choosing What's "Better For You?" (same poster as before)

Undergraduate Research Symposium

April 22-25, 2025

At this year's Undergrad Research Symposium, we had three presenters and Prof Li also served as a poster judge. All three presenters did great and they got lots of questions from attendees.

Marah presented talk on Anxiety Effects on College Student Decision Making
Win presented talked on Decision-Making Traits and the Utilization of Generative AI in Higher Education (failed to get a photo of this)
Iva presented poster on From Candy to Carrots: Can Health-Promoting Tags Lead to Choosing What's "Better For You?"

BEDLab Awards, Games, and Farewells

June 13, 2024

We celebrated our last meeting of the academic year with a mini party featuring awards, lab photo, games, and dinner at Georgie's.

Rookies of the Year: Iva Mihajlovic and William Lam

MIPs (Most Improved Player): Shreya Deshmukh and Matthew Dimaandal

MVPs: Alyssa Fundal and Sam Haoyang Fan

We bid a fond farewell to graduating seniors Shreya Deshmukh, Alyssa Fundal, Chuqi (Angel) Jin, Jordan (Grayson) Law, Ashwin Ramaseshan, Richard Wang, and Sonali Whittle. We look forward to you returning in the future to tell you about how you've used what you've learned in BEDLab in your future careers!

Alyssa Fundal wins award at R'PSYC

June 2, 2024

Alyssa presented her food waste research as a poster session at R'PSYC (R’PSYC – UCR | Department of Psychology) and won an award for "Most Promising Real-World Implications." (Thanks to Dr. Jimmy Calanchini for sending this photo of Alyssa "killing it.")

Alyssa and Ziyi receive their PhDs

June 1, 2024

Alyssa Wicker and Ziyi Zhang received their hoods in the PhD Hooding Ceremony today. This is the equivalent of commencement but it's only for PhDs (and MFAs). Congrats Drs. Wicker and Zhang!

Undergrad Research Symposium

May 10, 2024

Shreya presented her research on gym nudges and Alyssa presented her food waste research at the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium poster session.

Iva also presented a talk on "Mindfulness, Patience, and Intertemporal Choice: Can Mindfulness Increase Patience?" on Wednesday and did a great job, but we forgot a photo...

Iva, Alyssa, and Shreya present at NCUR

April 10, 2024

In a BEDLab first, three of our members presented at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR), and all had a great time with lots of interest in their research.

Iva presented her work mindfulness and intertemporal choice in what turned out to be a dueling talks session (jk...but they DID use a curtain between two speakers to divide a big speaker room).

Shreya presented a poster on Nudging Gym Attendance at UCR and Alyssa presented her poster on Using Social Norms to Reduce Food Waste at Dining Halls.

Helen Huang receives Honors cords

May 25, 2023

Helen Huang received her honors cords at the Honors Convocation today, the third BEDLabber to do so (after Michael Wong and Gabriel Morada). Unfortunately, Prof Li could not attend. Congrats Helen! BEDLab is proud of you!

Alyssa Fundal receives Chancellor's Research Fellowship

May 23rd, 2023

I am proud to announce that Alyssa "Eliza" Fundal has been selected as a Chancellor's Research Fellow (CRF) from the UCR Office of Undergraduate Education. Her CRF proposal was one of the 13 awardees selected from dozens of competitive applicants. Alyssa is a third-year Environmental Science and Psychology double major and she will be working on a project that combines these interests: "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Social Responsibility-Based Poster Messaging at Demotivating Food Waste Behaviors in UCR Residential Dining Halls." Professor Li will serve as her faculty mentor for the CRF, which comes with $5000 summer stipend and $750 in research funding. This is actually the first time a project mentored by a business school professor has been selected for the CRF!

We all look forward to hearing about the results of this study!

Xiang Shi receives Masters in Analytics

May 12th, 2023

BEDLab Research Assistant and data scientist Xiang Shi has just graduated from USC with a Masters of Analytics. She starts work as a Product Manager in a few weeks, although she'll continue to work on our NLP Compliments project!

Helen Huang's research paper accepted at UCR's Undergraduate Research Journal

May 6, 2023

The best emails one can receive in academia are the ones that contain the words "accept your submission." Helen Huang, 4th year Business Econ major, submitted her paper "Less is Less: Fast Ad Delivery Undermines Impact" to UCR's Undergraduate Research Journal on April 7th and after a round of revisions, just heard that the paper was accepted! This is the first time an undergraduate BEDLab member has published their research paper and is a testament to Helen's drive, not to mention getting an early enough start to the project to manage all the deadlines. This paper is also her Honors Capstone Project, which means she will be receiving her Honors Cords at a special Honors Convocation later this month. Congrats, Helen!

Helen Huang's presents at UCR's Undergraduate Research Symposium

April 27th, 2023

Helen Huang, 4th year Business Econ major, presented her Honors Project on speeding up advertisements: "Less is Less: Fast Ad Delivery Undermines Impact" In the 2023 UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium. Although the 15-minute presentation was virtual, it still represents the first oral presentation given by a BEDLab member (but certainly not the last). The first (and only prior) Symposium presentation was by Gabriel Morada in 2019. Great job representing for BEDLab to the UCR academic community!

Andy Li accepted to 5 schools, chooses UChicago Analytics

April 14th, 2023

BEDLab Research Assistant Andy Li applied to a variety of schools for Masters of Business Analytics type programs. He ultimately chose the University of Chicago (Prof Li's Alma Matar) for their Analytics Masters and was also admitted by Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, UCSD, and NCSU. Congrats, Andy! You'll have an intense few years of training, but it's a great start to an exciting career path.

COVID Recap

July 1st, 2022

Although our news page hasn't been updated in 1.5 years, BEDLab has still been busy. We've seen many new students join BEDLab, almost as many graduate, started a few students led projects (details soon), and published a few papers in the meantime:

Michael P. Haselhuhn, Elaine M. Wong (UCR faculty), and Margaret E. Ormiston. (2022) In press, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Ye Li, Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, Daniel Wall, Eric J. Johnson, Olivier Toubia, and Daniel M. Bartels (2022). “The More You Ask, the Less You Get: When Additional Questions Hurt External Validity.” In press, Journal of Marketing Research.
Yun Jie (former BEDLab grad student) and Ye Li (2022). [author order alphabetical] “Chronological Cues and Consumers’ Preference for Mere Newness.” In press, Journal of Retailing.
Eli R. Sugarman, Ye Li, and Eric J. Johnson (2021). “Local Warming is Real: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Recent Temperature on Climate Change Beliefs.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 42(12), 121-126.

2021-2022 Academic Year saw Dr. Zhang on sabbatical, and 2022-2023 will see Drs. Li and Haselhuhn on sabbatical (but we'll still be meeting).

Last but not least, Prof. Li received tenure, and is an Associate Professor as of today!

BEDLab's first award

January 31st, 2021

I'm super proud and excited to announce that longtime BEDLab member and University Honors student, Michael Wong, has been recognized as a Howard H Hayes, Jr. Research Scholar. This award is a first for BEDLab and (I think) a first for a School of Business student. Congrats, Michael! You do us proud =)

Michael also presented his honors capstone project on Loneliness and Decision Making that was the basis for this award in BEDLab this quarter. It was an educational talk that generated lots of questions from the other students and hopefully inspired some future projects from the younger students!

A virtual welcome to 2020/21

October 6th, 2020

We had our first lab meeting of the new school year (virtually), but seems like that parenthetical can just be assumed for the rest of this academic year =(

Despite the difficult circumstances, 2020/21 promises to be the best year for BEDLab, yet. We have a host of new members, including a new co-director (Prof. Michael Haselhuhn), Management PhD student Ziyi (Zoe) Zhang, our first ever MBA student Mehdi Salehi, and 6 new undergraduate research assistants (a warm welcome to Dani, Devon, Maricela, Anika, Ashika, and Nidhi!).

We are particularly excited about the BEDLab research projects we're continuing or starting this year. In addition to the ongoing research projects led by Michael Wong (loneliness and self-control) and Pri Iyer (competitive student behaviors), Karlee Labrador has launched a new project on intention-action gaps in students' sustainability behaviors (e.g., using reusable water bottles).

We are also starting 2-3 registered replication projects. Basically, a lot of behavioral science is based on exciting findings from the pre-MTurk era when data collection was harder and studies often were extremely underpowered (as few as n = 10 per condition)! This means that replicating important findings is very important for building a cumulative knowledge structure that we can be confident in. Teams of 2-4 students, led by faculty and/or grad student mentors, will choose highly cited but (likely) underpowered studies to conduct pre-registered replications. This not only contributes to science, but also will provide hands on experience to students on using Qualtrics to design surveys, collecting and analyzing data, and writing academic-style reports. I think this is SUPER exciting and I think the students are as well!

In fact, we're so excited about this quarter that we voted to meet weekly (rather than biweekly) and I'm sure we'll have plenty to report here soon!

Last meeting of 2019/20 year!

June 4th, 2020

Today was our last meeting of the academic year. It's been a really crazy quarter but I'm thankful that I had the brilliant, friendly, and curious members of BEDLab to hang out with five times. Here's a picture of our last Zoom lab meeting, where we played Jackbox games (thanks, Alyssa!). Not quite the same as in person board games, but a nice distraction from the events of late.

Congrats to Handy Ho, Michelle Wan, Shirin Aminian, Danielle Jourdin, Kaitlyn Mojica, and Chelsea Nguyen on completing their UCR journeys. We're proud of you and look forward to hearing about all your future accomplishments as BEDLab Alumni!

First ever BEDLab board games

March 4th, 2020

As my students should know, Profs. Li and Zhang are big fans of modern board games. We took a break from our regularly scheduled programming to play some Codenames and Sushi Go Party for the last lab meeting of Winter Quarter. It turns out this would be the last in-person BEDLab meeting for a long time...

First meeting of 2019/20 year!

October 1st, 2019

We've started off the new school year with a big group. Our first meeting overflowed the Dean's Conference Room even though many couldn't attend! We welcomed 5 new members and 8 returning members and talked about some of the many ongoing student-lead projects.

Looking forward to a year of learning from each other, collecting and analyzing lots of great data, and having fun!

Congrats to the Class of 2019!

June 14, 2019

Another year of BEDLab is behind us and another series of fond goodbyes. BEDLab is a lifelong membership...don't forget us when you apply the skills and knowledge you've learned here in the 'real' world!

Frank Lieu
Gabriel Morada
Luis Macedo
Ooha Nakka
Harsh Patel
Wesley Townley

P.S. BEDLab virtual lab meetings will be starting soon. Very excited to get an array of student-led research projects started!

2019 BEDLab Awards

May 30, 2019

Last meeting of the academic year! We handed out the first ever BEDLab Awards. Photo credit to Charles (scroll through below).

Excellence in Lab Assistance: Frank, Handy, Luis, Wesley (honorable mentions to Gabriel, who once ran the entire lab himself for a week--i.e., did Puya's job--and during the most complex study of the year)
Excellence in Literature Review: Danielle, Shirin (honorable mentions to Frank, Michelle, and Wesley)
Excellence in Graduate Student Contributions: Alyssa (a freebie, but she really has been an amazing addition to BEDLab and an awesome mentor for Gabriel's honors project)
Excellence in Independent Research: Gabriel (also a freebie, but his poster will live on forever as the first ever from BEDLab, but I think we'll have plenty more next year!)
Excellence in Mentorship: Ye (Charles made this determination on the fly...everything else was legit by discussion)

First ever BEDLab poster presentation by Gabriel Morada

May 14, 2019

Our very own Gabriel Morada presented his poster at this year's UCR Undergrad Research Symposium. The product of a year's work, Gabriel's honors capstone project examined what factors predict happier usage of Instagram. Special shout out to Alyssa for guiding him through the home stretch when my schedule got too busy!

This is our first poster, but definitely not the last! Good job, Gabriel!

Congrats to the Class of 2018!

June 15, 2018

The academic year is over, and with that, we must bid fond farewells to our seniors. We wish you best of luck post-UCR and hope that the experience and skills gained from BEDLab serve you well in your future journeys.

Amanda Sze
Anita Jamshidi
Fariha Patel
James Wen
Kaelen Wong
Pa Kou Chang

P.S. BEDLab is going strong this summer and we have been launching some new student-led research projects that will be collecting data imminently!

First Meeting!

Friday, October 6th, 2017

BEDLab held its first meeting of the 2017-2018 academic year on October 5th, celebrating with pizza and enjoying the first few days of fall as the lab members discussed their research interests and research plans for the year.

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