After receiving his PhD in Quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1990, Erev joined the faculty of industrial Engineering and Management (now called the faculty of Data and Decision Science) at the Technion.  He served as vice dean in charge of the MBA program, and the president of the European Association for Decision Making.  Erev also served as a visiting research associate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh; a Michael A. Gould fellow at Columbia Business School; a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School; a fellow at the Israel Center of Advanced Studies; a visiting professor at Erasmus School of Economics; a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (now Reichman University); and a research environment professor at Warwick Business School.

His research clarifies the conditions under which wise incentive systems can solve behavioral and social problems. Among the contributions of this research is the discovery of a robust description-experience-gap: People exhibit oversensitivity to rare events when they decide based on a description of the incentive structure, but experience reverses this bias and leads to underweighting of rare events. Comparison of alternative models favors the assumption that people tend to select the option that led to the best outcome in a small sample of similar past experiences. These observations imply that incentives are most effective when they ensure that the socially desirable behavior maximizes payoff, and minimizes the probability of regret. 

Erev plans to accept new students for Fall 2025 admissions.

Selected papers:

Erev, I., Ert, E., Plonsky, O., & Roth, Y. (2023), “Contradictory deviations from maximization: Environment-specific Biases, or reflections of basic properties of human learning?” Psychological review. 130(3), 640-676.

Erev, I., Roth, Y., & Sonsino D., (2022), “Decisions from valuations of unknown payoff distributions”. Decision, 9(2), 172–193. 

Erev, I., Ert, E. Plosky, O., Cohen, D., & Cohen O. (2017). From anomalies to forecasts: Toward a descriptive model of decisions under risk, under ambiguity, and from experience. Psychological review,122(4), 369-469. 

Plonsky, O., Teodorescu, K., Erev, I. (2015), “Reliance on small samples, the wavy recency effect, and similarity-based reasoning”.  Psychological review, 122(4), 621-647. 

Erev, I & Roth A. E. (2014), “Maximization, learning and economic behavior.  Proceedings and National Academy of Science, 111, 10818–10825.

Hertwig, R., & Erev, I. (2009), “The description–experience gap in risky choice”.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 517-523.