The Applied Behavioral Economics Scholar Program
A six-week fellowship plus Week Zero in Applied Behavioral Economics & Choice Architecture. Master decision theory, diagnose commercial friction, and produce a consultancy-grade Behavioral Strategy Brief.
Program at a Glance
A quick reference to the structure, faculty commitment, cohort parameters, and key deliverables.
Program Name
Scholar FellowshipThe Applied Behavioral Economics Scholar Program
Vertical
InterdisciplinaryBusiness & Economics
Duration
7 Weeks TotalWeek Zero (self-paced reading) plus six live teaching weeks
Live Sessions
Discussion-LedSix 90-minute live teaching sessions, plus two optional 30-minute Open Desk drop-ins
Professor Contact Time
100% Professor Time10 hours total — the professor’s complete commitment dedicated to direct live instruction
Live Session Time
Global Cohort FriendlySaturdays: 7:00 a.m. Eastern (US) — 3:00 p.m. Gulf Standard Time (Dubai & UAE) — 4:30 p.m. India Standard Time
Cohort Size & Grade
Selective (20-25 Fellows)Grades 9–12, 20 to 25 fellows, admitted strictly by application and interview
Taught By
No TAsProfessor Kimberly Rose Clark, Ph.D. No teaching assistants — all instruction is delivered by the professor
Final Deliverable
Consultancy BriefThe Behavioral Strategy Brief: a 1,200–1,500 word business brief plus a five-slide client deck
Post-Program Support
Writing CoachingPh.D. writing coaches available after the program to polish brief for admissions or research paper extension
Important Scheduling Note: US Daylight Saving Time (DST) Transition
United States daylight saving time ends on 1 November 2026. If any session falls after that date, 7:00 a.m. Eastern converts instead to 4:00 p.m. in Dubai (GST) and 5:30 p.m. in India (IST). All fellows will receive advance calendar notifications.
Why Join The Fellowship?
This fellowship bridges academic decision science and high-stakes commercial execution.
Taught by a 25-Year Industry Veteran
You learn behavioral economics from someone who sold it to Fortune 500 clients for 25 years. Every framework is taught alongside what happened when a real company tried to act on it.
A Business Deliverable, Not an Essay
You leave with a Behavioral Strategy Brief—the exact format top strategy consultancies and in-house behavioral teams actually produce to drive decision-making.
Workload Designed to be Finished
Six sessions, five short mini-assignments, and a deliverable that assembles seamlessly from work you have already completed week-by-week rather than appearing as a blank page at the end.
Read Real Literature Before You Meet
Ten peer-reviewed papers in Week Zero means Session 01 starts directly at high-level critical discussion, not basic definitions or textbook recitation.
Ph.D. Writing Coach Post-Program Handoff
Ph.D. writing coaches pick up where the program ends, helping you polish your brief into a portfolio piece to present to admissions readers or extend into an independent research paper.
Meet Your Professor
Direct live instruction from a Dartmouth scholar and veteran commercial CRO. No teaching assistants—ever.
Kimberly Rose Clark, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer, Dartmouth College
Bridging Cognitive Neuroscience & Global Brand Strategy
Professor Kimberly Rose Clark holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College, where her doctoral work examined human decision-making under uncertainty. She leads Dartmouth’s Initiative for Research on Energy Communication Transformation (DIRECT) Lab.
She is also a self-described “pracademic”—an academic and working practitioner in the same field. With a fellow Dartmouth Ph.D., she co-founded Merchant Mechanics, a consumer research firm built to bridge behavioral psychology and neuroscience with commercial decision-making, serving as its Chief Research Officer for 25 years.
Dr. Clark designed and directed research programs for national and international retail brands, integrating attitudinal, behavioral, and implicit measures into single unified studies. She also taught Dartmouth’s first course in Consumer Neuroscience.
Your Final Deliverable: The Behavioral Strategy Brief
Each fellow produces one individual brief diagnosing a real decision problem, proposing choice-architecture interventions, and designing a rigorous test plan.
Zero Blank-Page Stress: Assembled Week-by-Week
Brief Section Anatomy
The Business Problem
Built in Mini-Assignment 2The company or product, the specific decision point, the target audience, and the metric that is underperforming.
Behavioral Diagnosis
Built in Mini-Assignment 3A friction map of the decision journey, the choice architecture framework applied, and a causal mechanism—not a bias label.
Proposed Interventions
Built in Mini-Assignment 4Two or three ranked interventions calibrated with target mechanism, expected direction & magnitude of effect, and implementation cost.
Test Plan
Built in Mini-Assignment 5Randomised conditions, primary and guardrail metrics, duration logic, committed decision rule, and threats to validity. Design only.
Risks, Ethics, and Limits
Built in Mini-Assignment 5What could go wrong commercially and ethically, brand reputational exposure, and what the brief does not establish.
Example Project Shapes
Explore real topic directions selected by fellows across tech, retail, energy, and fintech.
Subscription Sludge Audit
A sludge audit of a subscription cancellation flow, with a proposal to reduce friction and a test plan for the retention trade-off.
Our 7-Step Process
From pre-program literature in Week Zero to lightning pitches in Week 6.
Pre-Program Literature Deep-Dive
Ten assigned papers, five classic and five recent, read before the first live session. One Reading Ledger submitted to the cohort board.
Industry Realism & Case Teardown
The professor's 25-year industry experience, reading debrief, and your first teardown of a real consumer decision point.
Topic Scoping & Partner Swap
Topic selection begins. Three candidate business problems proposed, ranked, and peer-questioned in partner swap.
Friction Mapping & Sludge Audits
Friction mapping and sludge auditing of your chosen case, converting bias labels into testable causal mechanisms.
Intervention Trio & Calibration
Three ranked interventions calibrated against real-world effect sizes, matching levers to targeted decision mechanisms.
Test Plan & 90s Pitch Coaching
The test plan, ethics review, executive summary, and live pitch coaching for your 90-second Showcase delivery.
Cohort Showcase & Coach Handoff
Lightning pitches to the full cohort, the professor's thematic cluster review, and handoff to Ph.D. writing coaches.
Week Zero: Pre-Program Reading List
Ten essential peer-reviewed papers (~120 pages total) read before Session 01 so we start directly at critical discussion.
10 Core Papers Read Before Day 1
Five classic foundational works paired with five recent meta-analyses and commercial RCT evaluations.
Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases
Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131
The origin of the bias vocabulary you will use all program—anchoring, availability, representativeness. Read it for the mechanisms, not the trivia.
Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk
Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291
Loss aversion and reference dependence explain more pricing, warranty, and subscription behavior than any other single idea in the field.
Mental accounting and consumer choice
Marketing Science, 4(3), 199–214
The most directly commercial of the classics. Bundling, sunk costs, and how customers mentally book a discount versus a surcharge.
When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006
The assortment question every retailer and product manager faces. Also a useful case in how a famous finding gets contested—note the effect sizes.
Do defaults save lives?
Science, 302(5649), 1338–1339 • https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091721
Two pages, one of the largest documented behavioral effects on record. The default is the single most powerful lever available to a business.
Mini-Assignment — The Reading Ledger
Build a ten-row table, one row per paper. Each row has three concise cells:
- The paper's central claim in one sentence
- One commercial/business implication in one sentence
- One critical question you would ask the author
Below the table, name the two papers most relevant to a company or industry you personally care about, and explain why in three sentences. Bring your sharpest question to Session 01—the reading debrief is built directly from these submissions.
The Six Teaching Weeks
Saturdays at 7:00 a.m. Eastern. Discussion-led live sessions ending with actionable mini-assignments.
Session Breakdown (90 Min Synchronous)
Oberlin College to Dartmouth Ph.D. Co-founding Merchant Mechanics, 25 years as CRO running research for national/international retail & consumer brands. Teaching Dartmouth's first Consumer Neuroscience course & leading the DIRECT Lab.
Integrating attitudinal, behavioral, and implicit measures. The gap at the centre of the field: people cannot always articulate drivers of their decisions. Worked example of a multi-method path-to-purchase study. What clients push back on.
Open floor on the ten Week Zero papers: which findings would you bet a marketing budget on, and which would you not? Responding to the sharpest questions from Reading Ledgers.
Pick one real decision you personally made as a customer in the last month. Identify: (a) decision point, (b) choice environment, (c) framework mechanism (describe mechanism, not just a label), and (d) scale metric. Post to cohort board.
Assessment Rubric & Assignments
Published to fellows in Week 2, not at the end, so you build directly against standards.
Mini-Assignments Summary
| Due After | Assignment | Output Specification | Estimated Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week Zero | The Reading Ledger | Ten-row table plus short reflection | 60–90 min plus reading |
| Week 1 | Decision Moment Teardown | 200–250 words | 45 min |
| Week 2 | Three Business Problems Card | One page, three ranked topics | 60 min plus peer swap |
| Week 3 | Friction Map | One annotated page or diagram | 90 min |
| Week 4 | Intervention Trio | One page, three ranked interventions | 75 min |
| Week 5 | Test Card and Executive Summary | One page plus 250 words | 90 min |
| Week 6 | The Behavioral Strategy Brief | 1,200–1,500 words plus five slides | Assembly and polish only |
Rubric Dimensions
Business Relevance
Weight: 20%A real decision point, a real quantifiable metric, and a plausible business owner who would care about the answer.
Diagnosis
Weight: 25%A causal mechanism that predicts behavior, not a bias label attached after the fact without explanatory power.
Intervention Design
Weight: 20%Interventions matched to the targeted mechanism, ranked honestly, with implementation costs acknowledged.
Test Plan Quality
Weight: 20%Conditions, metrics, and a decision rule committed in advance that would survive a critical reader. Limits stated plainly.
Communication
Weight: 15%Five slides and 250 executive summary words that make one clear, compelling argument to a commercial reader.
How Live Feedback Works
All feedback from Professor Clark is delivered live in session or at an Open Desk. Mini-assignments are posted to the cohort board, self-checked against the published rubric, and peer-reviewed in assigned pairs. There is no asynchronous grading or written feedback from the professor, maximizing her 10 live contact hours directly with fellows.
Ph.D. Writing Coach Support
Support from Ph.D. writing coaches begins once the fellowship has ended and the deliverable is complete. Coaches do not teach during the six weeks and do not co-author the brief.
Professor Time Budget (10.0 Hours)
All ten hours represent synchronous live contact with fellows. The design deliberately holds the professor's asynchronous load at zero to maximize direct teaching time.
| Commitment | Sessions | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching sessions 01 through 06 | 6 × 90 minutes | 9.0 hrs |
| Open Desk drop-ins A and B | 2 × 30 minutes | 1.0 hr |
| Asynchronous review, grading, or written feedback | None | 0.0 hrs |
| Total Professor Live Contact | 100% Synchronous | 10.0 hrs |
Program Guidelines & Ethics
Strict boundaries ensuring institutional compliance, research safety, and transparent academic framing.
No Data Collection from Human Subjects
Strictly prohibited: no surveys, interviews, or experiments involving classmates, family, teachers, customers, or online panels. All fellowship projects are rigorous analysis and choice architecture design only.
Public & Secondary Sources Only
All work must rely exclusively on published literature, public datasets, company SEC filings, public policy disclosures, and publicly accessible product and service user interfaces.
Recommendation Letters Policy
The professor’s role is instructor and Showcase reviewer. Letters of recommendation are explicitly not a feature of this program and must not be referenced in program materials or admissions conversations.
Fixed Published Calendar
The full calendar of six sessions and two Open Desks is published prior to Week Zero opening with fixed dates and times. Session times are not altered once published.
Public Positioning
Public-facing language describes the program as applied behavioral economics producing a consultancy-grade business brief—not as original academic research or a route to journal publication.
Ready to Master Choice Architecture & Behavioral Strategy?
Join 20 to 25 selected fellows for six live sessions with Dartmouth Professor Kimberly Rose Clark, Ph.D., and graduate with a consultancy-ready Behavioral Strategy Brief.