Our Team
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Sumit Karn works closely with Professor Sheena Iyengar at Columbia Business School on research examining how individuals and organizations evaluate ideas, identify promising opportunities, and decide which ideas to pursue.
An organizational sociologist and PhD researcher at Columbia University, Karn investigates the cultural and structural mechanisms underlying the diffusion of innovation and institutional change. His research examines how educational technology (EdTech) ideas spread across organizations and national contexts, gain legitimacy as solutions to educational problems, and become embedded in organizational practices or remain largely symbolic. Drawing on organizational theory, cultural sociology, and mixed methods, his work connects micro-level processes of idea evaluation and selection with macro-level processes of institutionalization and diffusion.
Before joining Columbia Business School, Karn worked across international development, education, and journalism, contributing to projects supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Gates Foundation and reporting for the Herald newspapers. These experiences inform his interdisciplinary approach to studying organizations and innovation. His research has appeared in Economic Analysis and Policy.Sheena S. Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business, Chair of the Management Division, and the Academic Director of the Innovation Hub at the Columbia Business School. She is one of the world’s experts on choice and innovation.
Iyengar is the recipient of the Thinkers50 2023 Innovation Award and the author of two award-winning books, The Art of Choosing (2010 Financial Times Business Book of the Year and #3 Bestselling Business Book on Amazon) and Think Bigger: How to Innovate (2023 Gold Medal recipient for the Axiom Business Book Awards and Thinkers50 Top 10 Management Book of the Year). Her recorded TED Talks have received a collective 7 million views and she regularly appears in top tier media such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, CNBC, CNN, The BBC, and NPR.
Iyengar is famously recognized for her “Jam Study,” which transformed the way we think about products offered in the marketplace and how we curate them for customers. Her “Jam Study” found that too many choices reduces customer purchasing and corporate growth. Since the Jam Study, there have been 1,000+ studies on the phenomena of choice overload which led to the pervasive 80/20 rule, observing that 80% of a company’s outcomes (outputs and revenue) come from 20% of causes (inputs and choices). She has applied her expertise in choice to advise hundreds of companies spanning business, technology, consumer retail, media, consulting, investing, and STEM to transform their decision-making criteria and elevate the stakeholder experience.
Iyengar created the Think Bigger method for innovative thinking and problem-solving based on recent advances in neuro- and cognitive sciences. Where prevailing methods for innovation, such as Design Thinking, teaches methods of customer research and feedback, Think Bigger concentrates on how creative ideas form in your mind and teaches a six-step method for innovation.
She was ranked by the Thinkers50 as a Top 10 Management Thinker in 2023. In 2022, Iyengar was ranked by the Asian American Business Development Center as one of the 50 Outstanding Asian Americans in Business. She received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the CBS Executive MBA Class of 2021. In 2012, Iyengar was recognized by Poets and Quants as one of the Best Business School Professors for her work merging academia with practice. In 2002, she was the only social scientist to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Office of the President.
Iyengar holds a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and a BA in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD from Stanford University.
In her personal life, as a blind woman, Iyengar intuitively used Think Bigger to find her calling and strives to inspire others to do the same.
Mike is now an Assistant Professor of Management at the Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research aims to create workplaces that better promote social, behavioral, and biological well-being, using methods including psychophysiology, economic games, and field experiments to understand the antecedents and consequences of prosocial behavior and inclusivity. He completed his PhD at Columbia Business School, and prior to that graduated summa cum laude from Elmhurst University with a BS in Psychology and Philosophy, and a minor in Biology.
Liat Hadar is an Affiliate Faculty member of the Choice Intelligence Lab, a Visiting Associate Professor of Business in the Marketing Division at Columbia Business School, and an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. Her research examines consumer judgment and decision making, with a particular focus on how knowledge, experience, and subjective beliefs shape decisions under risk and uncertainty. She studies financial decision making, consumer learning, choice architecture, online consumer behavior, and, more recently, the psychological barriers underlying e-commerce cart abandonment.
Her research has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Psychological Science. She has received research funding from the Israel Science Foundation and the European Commission's Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, and her work has been featured in international media outlets.
Before joining Tel Aviv University, Professor Hadar was a faculty member at the Arison School of Business at Reichman University (formerly IDC Herzliya) and a visiting scholar and lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She teaches consumer behavior, marketing management, and behavioral decision making in undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and doctoral programs.
Kimberly Klugescheid is a Ph.D. student in Management (Organizational Behavior) at Columbia Business School. She holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and an M.Sc. in Data Science from the University of Goettingen (Germany). Her research examines how AI shapes human thinking and behavior.
Erica is now an Assistant Professor of Management of Organizations at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on authenticity - how people understand and express who they really are, and how these perceptions shape behavior at work. Her recent work also explores how people evaluate AI-generated versus human advice, and what it means to preserve human value in the age of AI. She completed her PhD in Management at Columbia Business School.
C. Blaine Horton, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research examines how people generate, evaluate and communicate ideas, with a particular focus on creativity, innovation, social judgment and the dynamics of organizational life. His work has been published in leading outlets including Scientific Reports, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has been featured in media outlets including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Nautilus Magazine and Fast Company.
Before joining the University at Albany, Horton earned his PhD from Columbia Business School, where he held teaching roles in leadership, negotiation, strategy and entrepreneurship. His research bridges organizational behavior, psychology, entrepreneurship and human–AI collaboration.
In addition to his academic work, he brings experience as a former professional performer, consultant and co-founder of Think Bigger, a startup focused on creativity and innovation. These experiences inform his interest in how people present ideas, navigate evaluation and make creative work legible to others.
Dr. Andrew R. Marks is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University and an affiliate faculty member of the Choice Intelligence Lab. His research focuses on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying cellular function, including calcium signaling and its role in cardiovascular, muscular, and neurological disorders.
His involvement in the Lab's Physiology of Choice research area brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of decision-making, connecting fundamental physiological processes with broader questions concerning cognition, behavior, and human choice. His expertise offers opportunities to explore the biological foundations of decision-making and the potential implications of these mechanisms for understanding cognitive limitations and choice behavior.
Ahmed Ibrahim is a Research Scientist in the Management Division at Columbia Business School, where he works with Professor Sheena Iyengar in the Choice Intelligence Lab. His research examines how entrepreneurial ideas become realities. Specifically, he studies how entrepreneurs and innovators identify, evaluate, and pursue business opportunities, and how AI changes the mechanisms that convert those opportunities into value. His work spans two complementary threads: how people solve problems and generate innovative ideas, and how new venture ideas are evaluated and developed into viable business opportunities. He received his PhD in the Learning Sciences from McGill University. He also holds a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from New York University and a Chief AI Officer executive certificate from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is completing an Executive MBA at Columbia Business School.