William Ryan

My Research

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 one paper in this stream, 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.

My Bio

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.

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

APS Observer

Utilities and Tools

This section is for small scripts which I made for myself and found useful, and thought might be helpful for others. 

Qualtrics Backup Script

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.