Eric J. Johnson is a professor of marketing at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business. He is the Co-Director for the Center for Decision Sciences.
He began his professional career at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 as an Assistant Professor of Industrial Administration at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration. He served as an Associate Professor there from 1984-1987. Between 1984 and 1985, he was a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 1992 to 1999, he served as a Professor of Marketing, Decision Science and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and was the inaugural holder of the David W. Hauck Chair in Marketing. In 1999, he joined Columbia University as a Professor of Business. Johnson's research explores the interface between Behavioral Decision Research and Economics. He looks at the decisions made by consumers and managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing. Johnson has explored a wide range of topics, including how the way options are presented to decision-makers affect their choices in areas such as organ donation, the choice of environmentally friendly products, and investments. He is one of the originally developers of Query Theory and has done work on how memory informs preferences. He has also done work on process tracing and was one of the co-developers of Mouselab Web, a tool used to monitor decision makers information acquisition on the web. Recently, Johnson's work has focused on choice architecture and its influences on public policy. He is well known for his research on "adaptive decision making" wherein people change the mental processes by which they "decide to decide", depending on task and context effects. Subsequently, Johnson became a leading authority on cognitive psychology of online shopping. Conventional wisdom held that lowered search costs on the internet would lead to dramatically higher search and more price sensitivity. Johnson's research showed that most people searched relatively few sites in a given month Other authorities claimed that the goal for online retail sites was to make them "sticky" so shoppers spent a considerable amount of time at those sites. Johnson and colleagues showed that consumers develop loyalty for sites where it is easy to learn to become increasingly efficient at getting in and accomplishing one's desired shopping tasks. In his more recent research, Johnson has studied the cognitive psychology of consumer financial decisions, explaining how cognitive aging affects the quality of financial decisions. In the domain of mortgage choice, he has studied the behavioral economics of coping with underwater mortgages and the failure to refinance a mortgage when it is clearly in the consumer's financial interest. Johnson served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and is currently a member of several editorial boards as well as the Senior Editor for Decision Sciences at Behavioral Science and Policy and an Editor at Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience.
Writing
He has co-authored two books: Decision Research: A Field Guide and The Adaptive Decision-Maker. His work has appeared extensively in both news and scholarly journals, and he is one of the most highly cited scholars in Business and Economics.
Awards and honors
In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Economics from the University of St. Gallen for "trail-blazing work inthe field of Behavioral Economics” In 2013, he was named a fellow of the Association for Consumer Research.
