Gaël Le Mens

Assistant Professor of Economics and Business
Affiliated Professor,
Barcelona GSE
PhD
Stanford GSB

Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Department of Economics and Business
Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27
08005 Barcelona
Spain

E: gael.le-mens @ upf.edu
T: +34 93 542 27 17

 

[CV]
[UPF Faculty Profile]
[GSE Faculty Profile]
 

My research focuses on learning by individuals and organizations. Several of my papers explain how individuals might develop and maintain inaccurate beliefs because they rely on the biased samples of information they obtain from their experiences. The information used for learning may be biased because more information is available about alternatives that decision makers believe to be good and thus sample again, whereas less information is available about alternatives that decision makers believe to be poor and thus avoid. In addition, the information individuals have access to also depends on the opportunities the social context provides them with for learning about alternatives they might otherwise avoid.

Some of my other projects have examined the development of technological trajectories, the evolution of cultural tastes, and dynamics of organizational failure.

My research has been published in scientific journals such as Psychological Review or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA (PNAS), and popular accounts have appeared in the New York Times, the Times (London), WSJ.com, FT.com, USA Today, ABCNews.com, Focus and other in-print and online periodicals.
 

 

Publications

Interdependent Sampling and Social Influence (with Jerker Denrell), Psychological Review, April 2007, Vol. 114, No. 2, 398-422.
 
[PDF]
[Editor's website]
[Slideshow]
 

Illusory Correlation as the Outcome of Experience Sampling (with Jerker Denrell),  in B. C. Love, K. McRae, & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 421-426), August 2008. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
 

[PDF]

Studying Organizational Populations Over Time (with Glenn R. Carroll, Mi Feng and Dave McKendrick),  Handbook of Organizational Research Methods, D. Buchanan and A. Bryman (Eds.). Sage Publications, London, May 2009.
 

[Request paper]

How Adoption Speed Affects the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes (with Jonah Berger), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS), May 19th, 2009, 106:8146-8150.
 

[PDF]

Key Considerations in Studying Cultural Abandonment Using Baby Names (with Jonah Berger), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS), September 29th, 2009, 106.
 

[PDF]

Working Papers

Environmental Changes and the Dynamics of Organizational Mortality, under review, 2008.
 

[Request paper]

Organizational Evolution in a Fuzzy Technological Environment: Tape Drive Producers in the World Market, 1951-1998 (with Glenn Carroll, Edward Feng and Dave McKendrick), R&R at Organization Science, 2008.
 

[Request paper]

A Rational Analysis of Belief Formation Under Differential Access to Information (with Jerker Denrell), working paper, 2009.
 

[Request paper]

Learning to be Satisfied with the Status Quo (with Jerker Denrell), working paper, 2009. 
 

[Request paper]

Research in Progress

Hedonic Desires, Avoidance Behavior and Negativity Bias (with Jerker Denrell)
 

 

Age-Dependence Revisited (with Michael Hannan and László Pólos).

 

Conference Presentations (Past and Upcoming)

Adoption Velocity and the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes (with Jonah Berger). Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Chicago USA, August 2009.

Age-Dependence Revisited (with Michael Hannan). Paper presented at the Nagymaros Conference, Verona, Italy, July 2009.

Experience Sampling and Information about Foregone Payoffs. Oral presentation at the Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference, Chicago, IL, November 2008.

Experience Sampling in Causal Learning, symposium presentation at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, OMT division, Anaheim, CA, August 2008.

How Concerns for Legitimacy Can Bias Assessments of Efficiency (with Jerker Denrell). Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, OMT division, Anaheim, CA, August 2008, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 2008.

Organizational Evolution in a Fuzzy Technological Environment: Tape Drive Producers in the World Market, 1951-1998* (with Glenn R. Carroll, Mi Feng and Dave McKendrick). Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, OMT division, Anaheim, CA, August 2008 and at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 2008.

Illusory Correlations as the Outcome of Experiential Sampling (with Jerker Denrell). Paper presented at the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Washington, DC, July 2008, and at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology.

Adoption Velocity and the Death of Culture (with Jonah Berger), poster presented at the Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference, San Diego, Ca, April 2008.

Learning about Multi-Attribute Objects: Illusory Correlation in Person Perception (with Jerker Denrell), poster Presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference, Albuquerque, NV, February 2008; and at the Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference, San Diego, Ca, April 2008.

Endogenous Attitude Formation and Group Polarization: poster presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference, Albuquerque, NV, February 2008;

Environmental Changes and the Dynamics of Organizational Mortality, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 2007. Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, OMT division, Anaheim, CA, August 2008. Paper presented at the Ecology Conference, Antwerp, Belgium, June 2008.

Learning to be Myopic (with Jerker Denrell), 2007, paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, BPS division, Philadelphia, August 2007.

Cognitive Frames and Managerial Learning: Are More Refined Representations Always Better?, paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, BPS division, Atlanta, August 2006.

Interdependent Sampling and Social Influence (with Jerker Denrell), paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, Vancouver, July 2006.

Interdependent Sampling and Social Contagion (with Jerker Denrell), paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, OMT division, Honolulu, August 2005, and at the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, August 2005.

 

Technical Report

Swing Option Valuation Using Markov Chains Modeling (with Steven Brown), Electricité de France, Technical Report HR31/03/010/A, 2003.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra  |  Dpt of Economics and Business  |  Barcelona GSE