Overview
Ori Heffetz is a data-based economist, using lab and field surveys and experiments to study the psychological, social, and cultural aspects of economic behavior, well-being, and policy. Heffetz's work investigates what we can and cannot learn from economic and well-being indicators—household expenditures, the unemployment rate, or self-reported happiness—and how governments can use such data to guide policy. For example, he studies how people interpret and respond to survey questions, and how the resulting data are affected.
Heffetz also studies people's economic perceptions, inferences, beliefs, and expectations, how they are related to behavior, and how policymakers can take them into account to design better policies and markets. For example, he has studied product visibility and conspicuous consumption, and how people infer quality from prices, choose relative to reference points, and respond to reminders, deadlines, menu descriptions, guarantees of data privacy, or public information about health risk.
Heffetz holds a BA in physics and philosophy from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in economics from Princeton University. He is a co-author of a widely used Principles of Economics textbook, and has created an award-winning macroeconomics course that introduces basic concepts and tools from economic theory and applies them to current news and global events. Beyond his academic research and teaching, he advises governmental and non-governmental institutions, and writes and speaks about economic issues.
Publications
- Dreyfuss, Bnaya, Ofer Glicksohn, Ori Heffetz, and Assaf Romm. 2024. Deferred Acceptance with News Utility. Management Science, forthcoming.
- Heffetz, Ori, and Yehonatan Caspi. 2024. Measuring Self-Reported Well-Being. In Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by Alex Rees-Jones. Edward Elgar, forthcoming.
- Gonczarowski, Yannai, Ori Heffetz, Guy Ishai, and Clayton Thomas. 2024. Describing Deferred Acceptance and Strategyproofness to Participants: Experimental Analysis. Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ’24), July (abstract).
- Benjamin, Daniel J., Kristen B. Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles S. Kimball. 2024. From Happiness Data to Economic Conclusions. Annual Review of Economics, 16:359–391.
- Dreyfuss, Bnaya, Ori Heffetz, Guy Hoffman, Guy Ishai, and Alap Kshirsagar. 2024. Additive vs. Subtractive Earning in Shared Human-Robot Work Environments. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 217:692–704.
- Gonczarowski, Yannai, Ori Heffetz, and Clayton Thomas. 2023. Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions. Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ’23), July: 782 (abstract).
- Dekel, Inbal, Rachel Cummings, Ori Heffetz, and Katrina Ligett. 2023. The Privacy Elasticity of Behavior: Conceptualization and Application. Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ’23), July: 516 (abstract).
- Benjamin, Daniel J., Jakina Debnam Guzman, Marc Fleurbaey, Ori Heffetz, and Miles S. Kimball. 2023. What Do Happiness Data Mean? Theory and Survey Evidence. Journal of the European Economic Association, 21(6):2377–2412.
- Heffetz, Ori, and Matthew Rabin. 2023. Estimating Perceptions of the Relative COVID Risk of Different Social-Distancing Behaviors from Respondents’ Pairwise Assessments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(7).