SMU Assistant Professor of Marketing Jane Wang uses her background in economics and psychology to answer how the choices we make – and the trade-offs that come with each – affect our wellbeing. She examines in both her lab and out in the real world how consumers make decisions and how these decisions affect them as a whole. Assistant Prof Wang chanced upon the field of consumer judgement and decision-making by serendipity. While her undergraduate degree in economics armed her with theories and models aplenty to help chart and predict consumer and market behaviour, she felt like a fish out of water when she took a psychology course as a PhD student at Yale University. The class introduced her to the study of human perception, and questioned what people pay attention to, things that she had previously never thought much about. By the end of the first year of her PhD programme, she decided to pursue judgement and decision-making as her concentration. Her latest research on trade-offs and depletion in choice is based on research findings showing that self-control actually consumes energy, by drawing upon a limited pool of mental resource that feeds other executive functions and gets depleted after prior exertion.