George Wu

Behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, working at the intersection of judgment and decision-making and prospect theory. He matters to this vault as a co-author, with Chip Heath and Richard P. Larrick, of "Goals as Reference Points" (Cognitive Psychology, 1999) — the paper behind the vault's reference-point-plus-loss-aversion mechanism shared across the Fresh Start Effect, Gersick's midpoint transition, and the NBA halftime-deficit effect. His own faculty site is the only one of the three co-authors' sites that yielded directly quotable Tier-1 text this session — the paper's abstract, and a graduate-course syllabus page glossing it in his own words — confirming the mechanism's architecture even though the 1999 paper itself remains paywalled.

References

• claim-heath-larrick-wu-1999-abstract-states-reference-point-architecture
• claim-goals-as-reference-points-below-goal-work-harder
• question-verify-heath-larrick-wu-1999-goals-as-reference-points-primary
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-does-heath-larrick-wu-1999-goals-as-reference.md