David Schkade is the Jerome Katzin Professor of Management and Strategy at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. He specializes in the psychology of judgment and decision making, measuring subjective experience, and improving decision making.

The primary focus of Schkade’s research is on the psychology of judgment and decision making, and how decision making can be improved. His scholarly work includes over 60 published papers and two books, including his most recent, “Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary.” He has studied a wide variety of issues, including the relationship between money and happiness, the design of information displays for decision making, how jurors make punitive damage decisions, the effect of ideology on the decisions of federal appellate judges, environmental resource valuation, valuation of health effects for cost-benefit analysis and why people choose to become organ donors.

Schkade’s work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Hewlett Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Electric Power Research Institute, Exxon and IBM. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several major journals and on review panels of the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

He has also served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences, most recently on organ donation, and on cost-effectiveness of federal health-related policies, programs and regulations

He has won both research and teaching awards at the University of Texas and UCSD, and was selected to Who’s Who in Economics 1990-2000. His research on punitive damages has been cited in numerous court cases, including opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and the California State Supreme Court. His editorials, quotations and references to his work have appeared in numerous media outlets, among them The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, LA Times, Dallas Morning News, Time Magazine, CNN, UPI, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and BBC.