Rate My Professor Russell Golman

Russell Golman is a Professor of Behavioral Economics and Decision Sciences in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics from the University of Michigan, where his dissertation focused on population learning dynamics and boundedly rational behavior, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University. Golman began his association with CMU as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Decision Sciences in 2009, followed by roles as Visiting Assistant Professor (2010-2012), Director of the Quantitative Social Science Scholars Program (2010-2015), Assistant Professor (2012-2019), and Associate Professor since 2019. Trained as a game theorist, he has taught undergraduate courses on decision analysis, modeling complex social systems, game theory, behavioral game theory, and strategic decision making.

Golman's interdisciplinary research combines economics, psychology, and mathematics to develop theories of individual and social decision-making. Key contributions include models of belief-based utility explaining information avoidance, curiosity-driven information-seeking, and attitudes toward uncertainty; behavioral game theory predicting strategic deliberation in one-shot games, response times, and time pressure effects; and analyses of complex social dynamics where actors innovate through decentralized information gathering. His work has appeared in leading journals such as Science Advances, Psychological Review, Cognitive Psychology, Decision, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Journal of Economic Literature. Prominent publications include 'Information Avoidance' (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2016), 'Information Gaps: A Theory of Preferences Regarding the Presence and Absence of Information' (Journal of Economic Literature, 2017), 'A Dual Accumulator Model of Strategic Deliberation and Decision Making' (Psychological Review, 2020), 'The Demand for, and Avoidance of, Information' (Management Science, 2022), and 'Polya’s Bees: A Model of Decentralized Decision Making' (Science Advances, 2015). Golman edited a special issue of Games on Behavioral Game Theory and organized the 2017 Belief-Based Utility Conference funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His honors include being a finalist for the Exeter Prize (2020) and an NSF IGERT Fellowship. These contributions have significantly influenced behavioral economics and decision sciences.