Prelec studied applied mathematics as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in experimental psychology, supervised by Richard Herrnstein and Duncan Luce. He joined the MIT faculty in 1991.[2]

A study by Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people buying tickets to sporting events would be willing to pay significantly higher prices using credit cards than they would for cash purchases.[4][5][6] Prelec also devised a system for eliciting more truthful answers to polls based on paired questions in which one question of each pair asks about the respondent's own opinion and the other asks the respondent to estimate others' opinions.[7] Prelec is of Croatian descent.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology