Alan B. Gelder
Human Resources
Alan B. Gelder
Human Resources
Alan Gelder is a Research Staff Member in the Strategy, Forces and Resources Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). He leads the Human Capital Group’s quantitative portfolio, particularly in its effort to enhance defense personnel management using tools from economics, statistics, data science, and machine learning. He also chairs IDA’s Social Science Analytics Working Group.
Since joining IDA in 2016, he has been involved in a variety of projects, including efforts to operationalize DOD data analysis architectures; develop and field machine learning tools for predicting career events and personnel retention using a rich set of personnel records; support and design a multi-year personnel retention experiment; and assess legal, moral, and ethical implications of machine learning applications for personnel management.
Previous to coming to IDA, Alan was a post-doctoral fellow at the Economic Science Institute, Chapman University, in the lab of Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith. Alan’s academic work focuses on microeconomics, game theory, and experimental and behavioral economics. He has published in prominent journals for game theory, including Games and Economic Behavior and Economic Theory. Alan received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Iowa. He also holds an M.A. in economics from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University.
