Academy of Management OB Division Making Connections Award, as part of the symposium “Beyond biases: The influence of experience on managerial decision making”, (2008).

Christoph Ungemach joined the TUM School of Management in November 2016. Prior to that, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University for 3 years, where he is still a Research Affiliate at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. He also worked as a Data Scientist for a technology startup in New York.

Christoph Ungemach holds an advanced degree in Psychology from the Justus Liebig University Giessen and received his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick, where he was awarded a fellowship by the Economic and Social Research Council to conduct his research on decision making under risk and uncertainty. At Warwick, he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher for 3 years.

He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Christoph Ungemach’s research focuses on the behavioral science of decision-making. Working on the intersection of Economics and Cognitive Psychology, he seeks to understand the processes driving consumer choice across a variety of domains, including environmental and financial decisions. His current work investigates the application of choice architecture to help consumers make decisions that are better aligned with both their own preferences and social goals.

The findings of his research have been published in leading international journals, including Management Science, Psychological Science and Judgment, and Decision Making.

Research areas: Choice Architecture, Consumer Behavior, Judgment and Decision Making, Decisions under Risk and Uncertainty, and Consumer Analytics.

Choice Architecture: In collaboration with scholars at Columbia University and Duke University, Christoph Ungemach is investigating alternative Choice Architecture tools. His research has shown that, unlike traditional nudges, decision signposts can facilitate choices in line with both individual preferences and societal goals. This work has shown to be very useful, particularly in the domain of environmental decision making, and offers important insights for the design of consumer labels.

Another strand of his research is devoted to understanding the cognitive processes underlying decision making under risk and uncertainty. Christoph Ungemach has shown in his research that preferences can be altered by incidental experiences in systematic ways that challenge economic accounts. These findings are in line with decision making models in which subjective values are constructed from comparisons with samples and experiences from our environment or from memory.