About

Jana Gallus is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Behavioral Decision Making at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is an economist with a keen interest in studying incentives and social relationships, focusing her research and teaching at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and behavioral economics. Her work explores how incentive systems, both financial and nonfinancial, can be designed to leverage people's motivations and evaluate their impact on organizational performance. Gallus has collaborated with organizations such as Wikipedia, NASA, private sector firms, the American Red Cross, hospitals, schools, and universities. She is currently building the Center for Incentive Design, which adopts an interdisciplinary approach to addressing societal issues in education, health, and housing. Gallus serves as an Associate Editor at Management Science, a standing panelist for the NSF, and as the Director of the UCLA Anderson Behavioral Lab. Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich, and double Master’s degrees in Finance and Strategy, and International Affairs and Governance from the University of St. Gallen and Sciences Po Paris.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Economics
• Business
• Political science
• Public relations

Selected publications

• The Role of Reputational Costs in Dominant Leadership

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Why do some leaders adopt competition and dominance as strategies to gain and maintain influence? This symposium emphasizes the pivotal roles of anticipated relational and reputational costs in shaping leaders' behavior on their path to the top. We argue that individuals carefully consider the anticipated social impact of their behavior on subordinates and peers across various organizational contexts. Specifically, the research presented in this session highlights how situational and interpersonal factors—such as worldviews of human nature, perceived gender norms, dominance-oriented leadership styles, and competition versus cooperation—inform leaders’ mental calculus. These considerations influence their decisions to exert influence by threat and coercion, strategies for internal and external promotion, preferences for maintaining distance from subordinates, and sense of autonomy.

  PublisherDOI

• ELECTRONIC BEHAVIORAL NUDGES TO CLOSE CARDIOLOGY CARE GAPS: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL OF 56,000 PATIENTS

  Journal of the American College of Cardiology · 2025-03-29

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Awards: tangibility, self-signaling and signaling to others

  Experimental Economics · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Awards are widely used as incentives. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood through a framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an award, the social signals it emits, and its self-signaling function. We identify and discuss several major characteristics of awards through the lenses of these three dimensions: the audience, scarcity, the giver’s status, and the selection process. Based on our framework, we integrate the awards literature published across economics, psychology, management, and sociology journals to elucidate what has been learned and offer a roadmap for future experimental research on awards and incentives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Experiment: Lessons from Policymaking

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  This symposium proposes that experiments have the potential to be used more effectively in strategy and entrepreneurship research if they leverage methodological innovations from policy-makers. Policymakers traditionally diverge from researchers in their use of experiments, prioritizing a pragmatic understanding of 'what works' to find solutions to our grand challenges by embracing implementation complexity and context-dependent variations. The symposium combines the perspectives of experts on experiments in prominent organizations captured on video with a live debate and commentary with management scholars with deep expertise in experiments. The management scholars participating in the live debate will ‘translate’ best practices from the “real world” and discuss to what extent and how they can be applied to research in strategy and entrepreneurship by putting them in the context of their own work. Presenters will outline specific opportunities to advance the theory, techniques, and variety of topics that methodologically advanced experiments can address and provide actionable insights for researchers at all stages of their career. This symposium builds on the success of the symposia held during the Academy of Management 2022, 2023 and 2024 that focused on insights from economics, psychology and practitioners, respectively, and combined saw participation from over 250 scholars.

  PublisherDOI

• The Art and Science of Conducting Field Experiments

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Management scholars are increasingly turning to field experiments, also known as Randomized Controlled Trials, to investigate important research questions related to strategic decision making, incentives and organizational design, innovation processes, and entrepreneurial outcomes. However, the application of this method is relatively new within our community. This symposium brings together a group of highly experienced panelists who are all experts in this research methodology. During their presentations, these panelists will demystify the process and highlight key aspects of conducting field experiments, such as pre-registration, experimental design, implementation of experiments, partnerships with firms and policy makers, etc. The goal of this symposium is to help researchers new to field experiments gain a deeper understanding of this research method by introducing them to best practices, discussing common pitfalls when designing and implementing field experiment, and by providing hands-on tools and tips to get their projects off the ground.

  PublisherDOI

• Leaning In Softly: On Gender and Self-Promotion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• From Warm Glow to Cold Chill: The Effect of Choice Framing on Donations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Extant research and practitioner advice tout that organizations should give people choice to increase their prosociality. With three preregistered experiments across field and online settings (N=25,399), we challenge this assumption, identify conditions under which choice can be helpful versus harmful, and uncover the underlying psychological processes. We first show that relative to no choice, a choice framed as “what to give” (e.g., a “Basic Needs Basket” or a “Survivor’s Kit”) increases donation interest by elevating a sense of agency. However, framing that same choice as “who to help” (e.g., “Help a Child” or “Help a Trafficked Girl”) as opposed to “what to give” reduces donation interest as it causes decision discomfort. Importantly, the two competing mechanisms of agency and decision discomfort may cancel out when a choice framed as “who to help” is compared to not giving choice. This research provides a framework to understand the nuanced effects of giving choice on prosociality. While choice can enhance feelings of agency and satisfy individuals’ quest for a “warm glow”, facing a tradeoff between two recipient populations may instead elicit a “cold chill”, freezing the likelihood of donating at all.

  PublisherDOI

• From Warm Glow to Cold Chill: The Effect of Choice Framing on Donations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• From Warm Glow to Cold Chill: The Effect of Choice Framing on Donations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The “Hidden” Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  Advertising one’s credentials is crucial for career outcomes in organizational settings where individual performance is not easily observable. Consequently, if women engage in self-advocacy less often or advocate for themselves less fervently, it may exacerbate gender gaps in labor market outcomes. Across a series of pre-registered experiments involving 14,092 participants, including 8,546 adults and 5,546 adolescents, we investigate gender differences in whether and how men and women promote their credentials. We observe a consistent pattern across both adults and adolescents: women not only exhibit lower rates of self-promotion but, even when prompted to do so, convey lower self-ratings compared to their male counterparts. Importantly, this intensive margin gender gap persists even among those individuals who choose to self-promote on the extensive margin. In additional study waves employing various information treatments to address these gaps, we find that no treatment impacts both extensive and intensive margin gaps simultaneously, suggesting that these gaps are driven by different mechanisms. These gender gaps have important implications for economic outcomes, as self-promotion improves hiring outcomes for both men and women in our study context. Our findings highlight the importance of considering both extensive and intensive margin measures when documenting gender gaps and designing interventions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bruno S. Frey

  Roche Pharma AG (Germany)

  50 shared

• Joseph Reiff

  University of Maryland, College Park

  17 shared

• Benno Torgler

  University of Bayreuth

  16 shared

• Hengchen Dai

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  11 shared

• Alan Page Fiske

  University of California, Los Angeles

  11 shared

• Ho Fai Chan

  10 shared

• Todd Rogers

  7 shared

• Karim R. Lakhani

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Oxford University Press Honours versus Money: The Economics…
• Motivation and awards (B.S. Frey, J. Gallus)
• Volunteer organizations: Motivating with awards (B.S. Frey,…
• Happiness: Research and policy considerations (B.S. Frey, J.…
• The best ways to give employees performance awards (J. Gallu…