About Us > Advisors

Prof. Dan Ariely

As a leading behavioral economist, Dan Ariely studies how people actually behave in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. Dan has been advising Boulevard R on how to optimize our service so that users stay motivated throughout the planning process and take concrete steps to improve their financial security.

Dan holds a joint appointment between MIT's MeidaLab and Sloan School of Management. He is the principal investigator of the Lab's eRationality group and a visiting professor at Duke University. Dan is also a visiting scholar at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, a fellow at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, and President elect of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Dan earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Tel Aviv University, his master's and doctorate degrees in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina, and a doctorate in Business Administration from Duke University.

He is the author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions and he serves on the editorial review board of a number of journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Interactive Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Research. He is currently working on a new book titled Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Sink.

Bernie Newcomb

Bernie is one of the two founders of E*Trade. He is responsible for writing the code that made it possible to execute stock trades over the Internet, thereby dramatically reducing the cost to execute a trade and providing an innovative new service for consumers.

E*Trade started out as Trade*Plus and in 1992, PC Magazine featured Trade*Plus, on its cover, while The San Jose Business Journal named Trade*Plus the year's fastest growing private company in Silicon Valley. In 1996, Trade*Plus was renamed E*Trade Group and went public. E*Trade is now household name with more than 4 million account holders who can trade stock and bank online.

In 2006, Bernie was awarded the Helen Keller Achievement Award by the American Foundation for the Blind for his work to improve the quality of life for the blind.