William Ryan
I'm a PhD Candidate in Marketing at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. I expected to graduate in May 2025, and am currently on the academic job market. You can find my CV here.
My research centers on how consumers make judgments and decisions in the marketplace. In particular, how they might err or fall prey to biases, and how these biases can be corrected. One of my primary research streams has been how consumers manage risky situations once they have entered into them. In my job market paper, I examine how people hedge to make a bad outcome less bad if it does occur (e.g., purchasing insurance/warranties, making backup plans in case plans fall through). In another related paper, I investigate how people spend time, money, or effort to increase their chances of a good outcome (e.g., investing more money into an ad campaign for a project launch, studying more for an upcoming test).
Other areas of interest include studying and remediating consumer cognitive biases in the marketplace and combining machine learning methods with experimentation to get bottom-up insights into consumer behavior from big data. While not my primary focus, I am also interested in metascience and methods work that helps others in my community better conduct research.
I graduated Harvard with a BA in 2014. After graduation I worked at TGG Group, a behavioral economics consulting firm founded by Daniel Kahneman, Steve Levitt, and other academics and business leaders. While there I ran field experiments and did econometric analysis for businesses, governments, and non-profits. After leaving TGG, I completed a Post-Baccalaureate program in Psychology at UC Berkeley, working in Anne Collin's Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, before entering my PhD in Marketing, focused on Consumer Behavior, in 2019. I was Berkeley Haas's AMA-Sheth Doctoral Fellow in 2023.
You can get in touch at wryan@berkeley.edu or williamhryan@gmail.com
My CV | My Google Scholar | My Open Science Foundation Page
Job Market Paper
(click the titles to see full text of papers)
People are (Shockingly) Bad at Valuing Hedges
William H. Ryan, Stephen M. Baum, and Ellen R.K. Evers
Data, materials, preregistrations
Publications
People Behave as if they Anticipate Regret Conditional on Experiencing a Bad Outcome
Psychological Science (2024)
William H. Ryan*, Stephen M. Baum* (*co-first author) and Ellen R.K. Evers
Data, materials, preregistrations
Once and Again: Repeated viewing affects judgments of spontaneity and preparation
Psychological Science (2024)
Kristin Donnelly, William H. Ryan, and Leif Nelson
Data, materials, preregistrations
Poisson Regressions: A Little Fishy
Collabra: Psychology (2021)
William H. Ryan, Ellen R.K. Evers, and Don A. Moore
Data, materials, preregistrations
Graphs with Logarithmic Axes Distort Lay Judgments
Behavioral Science & Policy (2020)
William H. Ryan and Ellen R.K. Evers
Data, materials, preregistrations
Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results
Psychological Bulletin (2020)
Justin Landy, ... , William H. Ryan & other members of the Crowdsourcing Hypothesis Tests Collaboration
Data, materials, preregistrations
Working Papers
A Combined Machine Learning and Experimental Approach for Finding Causal Effects in Large Naturalistic Datasets
William H. Ryan, Philipp Hadjimina, Clayton R. Critcher
(Email for draft)
There is a Potential Collector in Every Consumer
William H. Ryan,* Ellen R.K. Evers*, and Siegwart Lindenberg
Regret Can Explain Puzzling Valuations of Bets and Hedges
William H. Ryan, Stephen M. Baum, and Ellen R.K. Evers
(Email for draft)
William H. Ryan and Ellen R.K. Evers.
A comment on this paper. For other critiques of this paper, as well as the authors' responses, see Joseph Cesario's website.
Media Coverage of Research
For People Behave as if they Anticipate Regret Conditional on a Bad Outcome
Berkeley Haas Newsroom; Berkeley Haas Magazine; APS Under the Cortex podcast interview
For Once and Again: Repeated viewing affects judgments of spontaneity and preparation
Utilities and Tools
This section is for small scripts which I made for myself and found useful, and thought might be helpful for others.
I wrote a short script to make a backup of your Qualtrics account which downloads all the data and .qsf files for all of your surveys using the Qualtrics API. Helpful to have in case you are, for example, switching institutions and are worried your data will not migrate over successfully.