Asa Palley

Education: A.B., Bowdoin College; M.Sc., University of Maryland; M.Sc., Carnegie Mellon University; Ph.D., Duke University

Asa is an Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Data Analytics & Decision Sciences (DADS) area at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He also serves as an Associate Editor for Management Science.

At Darden, Asa teaches core Decision Analysis courses in the MBA program. He was named as one of Poets & Quants 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professors in 2024. 

Asa’s research is centered in the field of decision analysis, which uses quantitative models to help individuals and organizations make better decisions. This process often relies heavily on estimates of key variables in the decision problem as well as probability distributions to describe uncertainty about these variables. Asa’s research focuses on improving such assessments by studying how they can be obtained, how they should be adjusted, and how the availability of multiple experts can be leveraged to increase their accuracy. Secondary research areas include the application of decision analysis to public policy questions, learning in sequential decision problems, and investment in renewable electricity generation and storage capacity. His work has been published in Management Science, Experimental Economics, and Risk Analysis.

Before joining Darden, he was an Associate Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Asa received a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.