
Uma Karmarkar
Uma R. Karmarkar is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego
with a joint appointment in the Rady School of Management and the School of Global
Policy and Strategy. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Unit
of the Harvard Business School, and affiliated faculty with the Harvard Center for Brain
Science. Dr. Karmarkar received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA and a second
Ph.D. in Marketing from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Dr. Karmarkar’s research draws on fields such as consumer psychology, neuroscience
and behavioral economics to study how people use and integrate information in the world
around them to make everyday decisions. One stream of this work centers on uncertain
choices, where people have too little information, such as consumer financial decisions.
A second stream examines settings that can have “too much” information, such as retail
shopping experiences. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as
Neuron, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. It has also
received coverage in the popular press, including NPR, Scientific American, the Harvard
Business Review, the Economist and the New York Times.
Dr. Karmarkar’s research draws on fields such as consumer psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics to study how people use and integrate information in the world around them to make everyday decisions. One stream of this work centers on uncertain choices, where people have too little information, such as consumer financial decisions. A second stream examines settings that can have “too much” information, such as retail shopping experiences. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as Neuron, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. It has also received coverage in the popular press, including NPR, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and the New York Times.