---
title: "George Wu"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "George Wu"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Prospect Theory","loss aversion","reference points","Richard P. Larrick","goals as reference points"]
seek_code_commit: "46c6736"
---


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 [[entity-prospect-theory|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