Columbia Business School Practice Prize is awarded biennially to recognize a faculty member who has made significant contributions to the practice of business and policy. “Practice” in this context can mean for-profit, not-for-profit, or policy. The award is open to full-time Columbia Business School faculty who have demonstrated scholarly work that has had a major positive impact on the public or private sector, generating positive impacts on society, increasing firm profitability or efficiency, shaping the leadership structure of an organization, or affecting regulation or government policy.
Past Recipients
2026 - Eric Johnson, Norman Eig Professor of Business in the Marketing Division and the Director of the Center for the Decision Sciences, whose influential Science article “Do Defaults Save Lives?” (with Daniel Goldstein) provided evidence that helped to inspire policy changes to organ-donation defaults in multiple countries, including France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Chile, and Wales. Building on this foundation, Professor Johnson’s work has advanced the practical toolkit of “choice architecture” from improving consumer decisions in Affordable Care Act health-insurance marketplaces showing how well-chosen defaults and integrated cost calculators can bring typical consumers’ choices closer to those of sophisticated decision-makers.
2024 - The inaugural Columbia Business School Practice Prize recipient was Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate in the Finance Division, in recognition of his groundbreaking research on the intersection of housing, asset pricing, and macroeconomics — what he calls the urban doom loop.