Applying behavioral science to your venture with Kristen Berman, CEO & Co founder of Irrational Labs

Kristen Berman studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational.

Kristen co-founded Irrational Labs, a behavioral product design company, with Dan Ariely in 2013. Irrational Labs helps companies and nonprofits understand and leverage behavioral economics to increase the health, wealth and happiness of their users. She also co-founded Common Cents Lab, a Duke University initiative dedicated to improving the financial well-being for low to middle Americans. Under Kristen’s leadership, Common Cents launched over 50 experiments with companies, touching tens of thousands of people. Kristen’s work has been featured in The Stanford Innovation Review, TechCrunch, and Scientific American.

She was on the founding team for the behavioral economics group at Google, a group that touches over 26 teams across Google, and she hosted one of the top behavioral change conferences globally, StartupOnomics. She co-authored a series of workbooks called Hacking Human Nature for Good: A practical guide to changing behavior, with Dan Ariely. These workbooks are being used at companies like Google, Intuit, Netflix, Fidelity, Lending Club for business strategy and design work.

Before designing, testing and scaling products that use behavioral economics, Kristen was a Senior Product Manager at Intuit and startup, Lytro. She built product management and marketing systems for small businesses and consumers, for domestic and international markets. The core thread throughout this all is a deep passion for understanding why people behave the way they do and then building solutions that make their lives better. And in her personal life, Kristen lives behavioral science. She’s started a communal living environment called Radish, to design life for happiness.

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