Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on decision-making, and on issues related to behavioral economics, with an emphasis on empirical studies of how people make decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty. Most recently, he has focused on decision making in the context of poverty and, more generally, on the application of behavioral research to policy. A central theme is the tension between normative assumptions and behavioral findings, and the implications for policy design and implementation.

Shafir has been a consultant with the treasury department, he is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and of the Academic Advisory Board of the Behavioral Finance Forum, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and of the Filene Research Institute, Faculty Associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, and co-director of Ideas42, a social science R&D lab. He has held visiting positions, among others, at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, The Kennedy School of Government, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies, and Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University.