About

Dr. Lauren Eckhardt is the full-time director of the Atkinson Behavioral Research Lab at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego. She oversees the operations of the lab, which is a center for behavioral research focused on how individuals form judgments and make decisions in business contexts. The lab supports experiments involving a participant pool of over 2,000 undergraduates each quarter, facilitating research from more than 30 Rady faculty and graduate students. The lab is a cornerstone of innovation at the Rady School, contributing impactful insights that shape business practices across various industries. The lab was established in 2013 with foundational support from former UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson, a Professor of Cognitive Science and Psychology. Dr. Eckhardt, along with faculty PI Dr. Chris Oveis, manages the lab's activities, including research studies, participant recruitment, and facility operations. Her role involves coordinating research efforts, ensuring compliance with IRB and CITI training requirements, and fostering a collaborative environment for behavioral research in the business domain.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Finance
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Machine Learning
• Accounting
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematics
• Data Mining
• Public economics
• Law
• Monetary economics
• Medicine
• Business
• Mathematics education
• Medical education
• Econometrics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Learning to Quit? A Multi-Year, Multi-Site Field Experiment with Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurs

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-01-01

  reportOpen access

  We use a randomized experiment with 553 science-and technology-based startups in 12 co-working spaces across the US to evaluate the effects of intensive, short-term entrepreneurial training programs on survival and performance for innovation-driven startups.Treated startups are more likely to shut down their businesses and do so sooner than control startups.Conditional on survival, however, treated startups are more likely to raise external funding for their ventures, raise funding faster, and raise more funding than the control group; they also exhibit higher employment and revenue.Treated founders are less likely to found a new startup after shutdown.Our findings are consistent with practitioner arguments that early entrepreneurship training interventions can help entrepreneurs with less viable ventures "rationally quit" ("fail fast").We use machine learning techniques (causal random forest) to provide exploratory insights on the most impacted subgroups.

  PublisherDOI

• LEARNING TO QUIT? A MULTI-YEAR FIELD EXPERIMENT WITH INNOVATION DRIVEN ENTREPRENEURS*

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Incentivizing Cost Containment in Healthcare

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-04-27

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Incentivizing Cost Containment in Healthcare

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-04-27

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Incentivizing Cost Containment in Healthcare

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-04-27

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Making the Grade (But Not Disclosing It): How Withholding Grades Affects Student Behavior and Employment

  Management Science · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics education
  • Medical education

  We study the effects of grade nondisclosure (GND) policies implemented within master of business administration (MBA) programs at highly ranked business schools. GND precludes students from disclosing their grades and grade point averages (GPAs) to employers. In the labor market, we find that GND weakens the positive relation between GPA and employer desirability. During the MBA program, we find that GND reduces students’ academic effort for a given course by approximately 4.9% relative to comparable students not subject to the policy. Consistent with our model, in which abilities are potentially correlated and students can substitute effort toward other activities in order to signal GPA-focused abilities, students participate in more extracurricular activities and enroll in more difficult courses under GND. Finally, we show that students’ tenure with their first employers after graduation decreases under GND. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4816 .

  PublisherDOI

• What Motivates People to Pay Their Taxes? Evidence from Four Experiments on Tax Compliance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Making the Grade (But Not Disclosing It): How Withholding Grades Affects Student Behavior and Employment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using machine learning to detect misstatements

  Review of Accounting Studies · 2020 · 265 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence
  PublisherDOI

• The Only Prescription Is Transparency: The Effect of Charge-Price-Transparency Regulation on Healthcare Prices

  Management Science · 2020 · 69 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Business

  We examine the effect of charge-price-transparency regulation (PTR)—a common policy solution intended to curb rising healthcare costs—on hospitals’ prices. We find that, although PTR does not affect payments or consumer search, it does cause hospitals to reduce charges by approximately 5%. The reputational costs of perceived overcharging appear to be one impetus for the reduction in charges, suggesting that certain stakeholders who are able to impose costs on hospitals are unaware that hospitals can decouple charges from payments. The ineffectiveness of PTR policies in reducing payments and the apparent inability of some stakeholders to realize this fact could explain why charge-transparency policies have been widely adopted with little opposition. Overall, our findings provide a cautionary note—transparency regulation focusing on an indicator that can be decoupled from the construct of interest might placate some stakeholders without actually solving the underlying problem. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul G. Jewell

  Iowa State University

  10 shared

• Timothy C. Becker

  Arizona State University

  10 shared

• Edward J. Jaselskis

  10 shared

• Janaka Y. Ruwanpura

  9 shared

• Lahiru Silva

  University of Calgary

  9 shared

• John A. List

  University of Chicago

  8 shared

• Hans Bonde Christensen

  University of Chicago

  4 shared

• Mark G. Maffett

  4 shared

Labs

• Atkinson Behavioral Research LabPI

Awards & honors

• fundamental support through a generous donation from former…