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With a foundation in psychology, a master’s degree in neuroscience, lab management experience at Columbia Business School and a PhD in marketing from the Wharton School, brings a rich interdisciplinary perspective to her new role as assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, Business Economics and Law at the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business.

Duncan, who started July 1, 2025, studies how we make decisions and how small interventions can help people live happier, healthier lives. Drawing on her diverse background, she examines how technology and choice architecture shape consumer behaviour.

In this Q&A, Duncan shares insights on wearable tech — including a few thoughts on my new Oura ring — why sticking with goals matters and how she plans to spark curiosity in her students this year.

Transitioning from your PhD at The Wharton School to your first assistant professor role at the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ School of Business is a significant milestone. How has your journey shaped your approach to research and academia?

Something that drew me to Wharton, and to marketing more broadly, is its interdisciplinary nature. The department includes faculty from a range of academic backgrounds, including marketing, psychology, neuroscience, economics and statistics, and many hold cross-appointments in other departments. Because of both my own background and the environment at Wharton, my training has been highly interdisciplinary, rooted in both theories and methods across this diverse set of fields.

I believe this kind of cross-disciplinary perspective is essential for addressing real-world business and policy questions. My passion lies in helping consumers live happier and healthier lives. Many of the most important areas where we can make a meaningful impact, such as technology adoption, financial health and physical and mental well-being, for instance, sit at the intersection of multiple fields. I’m excited to carry this interdisciplinary approach forward in my role at ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ and through collaborations across the broader academic community.

Your research focuses on how tracking technologies and choice architecture can influence consumer behaviour. As someone who recently began using the Oura ring, I'm curious: what insights from your work can be applied to wearable devices like the Oura ring to improve motivation and decision-making around health goals?

Great question! In my research on tracking technology, I try to approach it from two angles: how the technology impacts consumers, and how we can modify or leverage it to better support them.

In one of my dissertation chapters (with Marissa Sharif and Jordan Etkin), we explore how checking frequency affects satisfaction with outcomes. Specifically, we find that checking more frequently can actually lower satisfaction, even when the outcomes are objectively positive. That is, when people monitor progress too often, it can make them less satisfied, even if there’s positive progress at every check-in. This happens because consumers tend to have overly optimistic expectations about what they’ll see, and even improvements can feel disappointing when they fall short of those expectations.

This may help explain why many people end up abandoning devices like fitness trackers: too much checking can wear down satisfaction and motivation. In our research, we find that a lower desire to reengage with the product is a downstream consequence of the reduced satisfaction caused by more frequent checking.

From a practical perspective, companies like Oura Ring might consider encouraging users to check their data less frequently throughout the day. Our research shows that simple interventions to reduce checking can boost satisfaction.

Consumers can also play a role in abating these effects. Practicing a bit of self-regulation and being mindful about how often we check may also help mitigate the negative effects of too frequent checking.

While our work points to a potential downside of these tools, that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or that consumers shouldn’t check them at all. Tracking technologies can be incredibly powerful when used thoughtfully, and the information the check-ins provide can be critical to reaching goals. The key is for researchers, practitioners and consumers alike to identify and be mindful of both the benefits and the tradeoffs.

You study the power of nudges to encourage behaviour change, such as helping consumers stick with their goals after setbacks. How do you see this concept evolving in real-world applications, particularly in the context of wearable health technology?

There’s a lot of research in the goal pursuit literature showing that consumers often abandon their goals after a goal violation. In other words, when a small failure happens on the path to a longer-term goal, people are likely to give up entirely.

The second chapter of my dissertation (with my advisor Marissa Sharif) looks at how we might encourage people to persist after these small failures. Specifically, we examine the idea of encouraging consumers to make up for failure. For example, if someone has a goal of working out 30 minutes a day and they miss a day, they would be encouraged to work out for 60 minutes the next day to make up for it. In these studies, we even use a custom tracking technology interface that allows people to reallocate extra minutes to the day before, changing the missed goal into a success. Overall, we find that this nudge can be powerful in increasing goal persistence after failure.

There has been relatively little research focused on encouraging persistence after goal violations. Most of the existing work has looked at how to prevent these failures in the first place. And while prevention is important, failure is inevitable. I think there is still a lot of opportunity to explore how to get people to persist and continue pursuing their goal without giving up.

This is where wearable tracking technology can become especially relevant. As these devices become more sophisticated and begin to integrate more new developments like AI, they offer an ideal platform for delivering nudges like the making-up-for-failure nudge. Because these technologies generate a wealth of behavioural data, they also create new opportunities for researchers to study goal pursuit in real time and at scale. This allows us to test interventions and understand consumer psychology around goals and motivation in ways that were simply not feasible before (for example, think of nudges personalized to each and every consumer).

So what I hope to see (and contribute to) is more and more companies collaborating with researchers and drawing on behavioural science to shape their technologies in ways that truly benefit consumers (and ultimately company and product performance as well).

Are there specific techniques or strategies you’ve found effective in helping students engage with your interdisciplinary approach?

I’ll be teaching Consumer Behaviour this fall, and the course naturally draws on research not just from marketing, but also from psychology and behavioural economics. Much of the material I'll cover comes from classic work in these fields. Because this classic work does not always immediately feel business or real-world relevant, it can be easy for students, when discussing topics like memory systems or how the brain stores information, to wonder how this connects to the business world and what they’ll be doing after graduation.

I think the best way to help students see the relevance of these theories is to ground them in real-world applications and provide opportunities for active engagement.

In my class, I plan to show several examples of marketing campaigns that apply different psychological principles. I’ll also ask students to identify their own examples and think through how they draw on the classic work, and we’ll read and discuss case studies that bring the material to life in a practical way.

Looking ahead, how do you see your research evolving, particularly in terms of its impact on both academic scholarship and practical applications in marketing and consumer behaviour? How do you plan to integrate your interdisciplinary background in neuroscience and education into your future projects?

Looking ahead, I plan to continue my work on how technology and choice architecture can be used to support long-term well-being and help people make more goal-consistent decisions. Given that technology is constantly evolving — and that its use to improve health and well-being is still relatively new — I think there’s a lot of opportunity to contribute meaningfully to both theory and practice in this space.

One area that I think the field is just beginning to explore is when and how choice architecture might backfire, or affect people differently based on personal factors. There’s been some excellent early work on this (including by two of my coauthors, Kellen Mrkva and Eric Johnson), but overall, it remains a relatively underdeveloped area. Something I’ve become increasingly interested in and hope to contribute to is better understanding the potential unintended consequences of behavioural interventions and how they impact different populations. I think that this can better inform the who, the when, and the why of effectively leveraging choice architecture.

While I don’t plan to conduct traditional neuroscience research, my background in neuroscience helps me think about the mechanisms that drive behaviour and the emotional and cognitive consequences of different interventions. I hope to continue drawing on this perspective to enrich and strengthen my future work.