In 2024, Tuck professor Daniel Feiler had a series of confidential conversations with executives of numerous NBA teams. As an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision making, Feiler was curious how these executives were using the proliferation of in-game data to make decisions about which players to trade, recruit, and draft. He found that, like managers in any organizational environment, NBA executives were prone to making biased decisions without even realizing it. They evaluated players using differing standards, or they didn’t fully account for the context of players’ performance, or they over-weighted how certain players performed against them.

In this podcast, Feiler discusses how he worked with NBA teams, and what he learned about decision biases that can apply to other corporate settings.