Faculty Expert Profile

Meng Zhu is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School who received her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include consumer judgment and decision making, contextual influences on preference construction, the causes of and solutions to inefficiency and inequality, and the impact of marketing cues and comparison standards.

Zhu has been quoted recently in a New York Times article about "precrastination," the tendency to complete goals as soon as possible when waiting would produce a better result. Zhu, who studies urgency, also published in the Harvard Business Review an article about why workers procrastinate when they have long deadlines. Longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work, she wrote. "This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting."

Fast Company quoted Zhu's research on how constraints, rather than an abundance of resources, actually forces brains to be more creative.