Daniel Walters

Daniel Walters is a Professor at INSEAD and the Director of the Marketing Insights Lab. He holds a PhD and MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Prior to his academic career Dan was in investment banking and investment management where he oversaw a portfolio of $200 million at a value focused, long/short equity hedge fund.

Daniel's research focuses on improving consumer judgment and decision making. He is particularly interested in understanding how people make inferences about missing information in the context of product decisions, investment judgments, and intertemporal choices. Daniel has examined how overconfidence in product inferences can stem from a neglect of unknown evidence, how memory biases impact overconfidence, how consumers fill in gaps in memory to make product judgments, and how beliefs about the nature of unknown information can impact investment behaviors, such as diversification, trading frequency, and willingness to seek financial advice. He has validated this research in theoretical and applied settings, using incentive compatible lab experiments, field studies, and large-scale datasets. Daniel has published his work in top academic journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Management Science, and PNAS. He has given talks on his research at the Association for Consumer Research, Society for Consumer Psychology, the Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making Conference, and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.