Elizabeth Bruch
Science Steering Committee, External Professor
Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan in 2008, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy program. She earned a PhD in Sociology and MS in Statistics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Bruch's longstanding interest is in the quantitative study of human behavior, and what it implies for larger scale social patterns and dynamics.
Her research combines substantive knowledge of human behavior from cognitive science, marketing, and decision theory with statistical techniques and richly textured online activity data in an effort to understand the dynamic interplay between human behavior and the social environment.
She has developed "cognitively plausible" statistical models of neighborhood and mate choice and is applying models from behavioral ecology to understand how men and women adapt their mate-seeking strategies to particular romantic markets.
She is also exploring how online dating markets are divided vertically into "leagues" and horizontally into "submarkets", as well as how people organize their search for romantic partners in space and time.