Robert Meyer is the Frederick H. Ecker/MetLife Insurance Professor and Co-Director of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He is a noted scholar whose research focuses on consumer decision analysis, sales response modeling, and decision making under uncertainty. Professor Meyer’s work has appeared in a wide variety of professional journals and books, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Risk Analysis. He is currently Senior Editor for journals of the American Marketing Association, and was former editor of the Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Letters. He also served as an associated editor for the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science. He has also served on the editorial review board of several major journals.
Professor Meyer’s recent research has focused on a range of topics in decision making and communication in the domains of consumer research and natural hazards preparedness. This work includes the use of natural-language processing tools to study how sensationalist news stories develop and spread on social media platforms, and how warnings messages are perceived by residents faced with natural disaster threats. For example, Professor Meyer and his colleagues have been able to show that failures of preparation that often precede catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, and the 2008/09 housing and equities collapse are consistent with a number of hard-wired biases in how people respond to risk. This includes a tendency for people to fail to learn as much as they should from near-misses, and under-invest in instruments whose value can only be realized in the long run. These ideas form the basis of his recent book, co-authored with Howard Kunreuther, the Ostrich Paradox: Why we under-prepare for Disasters.
At Wharton Professor Meyer has served as chair of the Marketing Department and Vice Dean of Wharton’s doctoral programs. His teaching interests include courses in New Product Management, Research Methods, and Marketing Strategy, which he has taught at the MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral levels. He is also an active participant in a number of Wharton’s executive education programs.
Professor Meyer joined the marketing faculty in 1990 after spending eight years on the faculty of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and two years at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. He also held appointments as visiting professor in the school of Business Administration at the University of Miami, the University of Sydney, and the University of Tokyo.
