Business PhD Spotlight: Rory Waisman

PhD candidate Rory Waisman has taken an unconventional path to academia. As a young entrepreneur, Rory started a small business while in high school and later worked in sales, marketing, and management in the advertising, construction, and public safety sectors. He eventually started his academic journey as a mature student, studying psychology at the University of Manitoba in his hometown of Winnipeg.

Fueled by observing many “irrational” decisions in the business world, Rory approached his undergraduate studies fascinated with how people make choices. He discovered his passion for research in a cognitive psychology course titled “Thinking” that introduced him to the scholarly examination of judgment and decision-making.

As Rory reports, “I was introduced to cognitive biases and the concept of choice architecture, and that ignited my intense curiosity about the psychological mechanisms that drive consumer decision-making.”

After completing his undergraduate studies, Rory joined the PhD program at the Alberta School of Business and is working with his advisor Professor Gerald Häubl on research driven by that curiosity.

"I applied to the graduate program at the University of Alberta because of the quality of research being done by the marketing scholars here. In particular, my research interests are perfectly aligned with the work being done by Professor Häubl at the intersection of cognitive psychology and consumer behaviour,” states Waisman.

Rory’s research explores how the conditions under which consumers encode, retrieve, and process mental representations influence their judgments, preferences, and decisions. A central theme of his work is choice architecture, a powerful tool used by marketers and policymakers to influence consumer decisions in areas like nutrition, finance, leisure, and sustainability.

While the immediate effects of choice architecture interventions have garnered significant attention, Rory focuses on their enduring effects on later behavior. Rory's dissertation specifically examines the impact of defaults in choice architecture and how they influence downstream preferences. Consumers are often presented with choices in which one option is set as the “default” or assumed choice, typically by being preselected. For example, YouTube automatically selects the next video to watch. Unless the consumer takes action to opt for an alternate video, the default option automatically starts to play. Rory proposes that defaults influence subsequent choices by altering the nature, frequency, and intensity of preference updating. In addition to making theoretical contributions, Rory aims to connect his research findings to real-world marketplace dynamics, revealing practical implications for consumers, firms, and policymakers. Rory argues, understanding the downstream effects of choice architecture is essential for its appropriate use as a marketing and policy tool.

In addition to his dissertation, Rory is investigating the psychology of maladaptive financial decisions, work that promises to make important theoretical and practical contributions in domains such as gambling, investing, and debt accumulation. Rory’s research has been published in esteemed journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research, Behavior Research Methods, and Methodological Innovations.