Robert Meyer

Marketing Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
meyerr@wharton.upenn.edu
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Robert Meyer is the Gayfryd Steinberg 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, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Risk Analysis. He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science, and serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and Marketing Letters.

As co-director of Wharton’s Risk center, some of Professor Meyer’s recent research has focused on how individuals decide to invest in mitigation against low-probability, high-consequence, events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks. Using laboratory simulations Professor Meyer and his colleagues have been able to show that the much-publicized failures of preparation that contributed to the losses from such recent events as the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina 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. One of the goals of the risk center is to aid the private and public sectors in developing strategies that allow these biases to be overcome.

Professor Meyer recently completed a six-year term as the Vice Dean of Wharton’s doctoral programs as well as chair of Wharton’s marketing department. 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 of Wharton 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 has served as a visiting professor in the school of economics at the University of Sydney, as well as in the school of Business Administration at the University of Miami. He received his Ph.D. in Transportation Geography from the University of Iowa in 1980.