Charles Sprenger

Charlie Sprenger is a behavioral and experimental economist. His research focus is intertemporal decision making and decision making under uncertainty. He designs experiments to test how people behave when faced with various decisions, ranging from food choices to the implementation of vaccination programs and more. His experiments have shown that the standard economic models of behavior are not consistent with how people act in real-life settings, and these findings suggest the need for new public policy strategies.

Sprenger received his bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford University in 2002 and a master's degree from University College London in 2005. He earned his PhD in economics from UC San Diego in 2011 and then served on the economics faculties at Stanford (2011–14) and UC San Diego (2015–20) before joining the Caltech faculty in 2020. He currently serves on the editorial board for the American Economic Review, and he is an associate editor for the Journal of the European Economic Association and Quantitative Economics. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2016.