McDonough School of Business
McDonough School of Business

Marketing Seminars and Workshops

The marketing department at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business hosts scholars, both from within the university and those from other schools, to present on various topics concerning their academic research. These seminars are open to the public and offer the McDonough School of Business community a chance to share new ideas and foster the highest quality of academic research on behalf of our invited faculty. 

Questions about upcoming events?

Contact Marketing Area Coordinator

Upcoming Events

Spring 2024

February 16, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Julia Levine
Johns Hopkins University

March 15, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Kaitlin Woolley
Cornell University

March 22, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Zhihao Zhang
University of Virginia

April 5, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Bryan Bollinger
New York University

April 19, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Dean Eckles
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

May 6, 2024: 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Jeffrey Lee
American University

Past Events

Fall 2023

September 9, 2023: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Stephanie Tully
University of Southern California

October 6, 2023: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Tl Kim
The University of Texas at Dallas

October 20, 2023: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Juanjuan Zhang
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

November 3, 2023: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Ioannis Evangelidis
Esade Ramon Llull University

November 10, 2023: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Joey Reiff
University of Maryland

Fall 2022

September 9, 2022: 2:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Chris Hydock
California Polytechnic State University

September 23, 2022: 2 – 3 p.m.
Jian Ni
John Hopkins University

Fall 2021

September 17, 2021: 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Shunyao Yan
Goethe University Frankfurt

October 1, 2021: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Isamar Troncoso
University of Southern California

October 15, 2021: 10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Ziwei Cong
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

October 29, 2021: 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Hortense Fong
Yale University

Spring 2021

February 26, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
George Newman
Yale School of Management

March 12, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Yesim Orhun
University of Michigan

April 9, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Abby Sussman
University of Chicago

April 23, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Marisa Sharif
Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

April 30, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Brent McFerran
Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University

May 7, 2021: 2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Cindy Cryder
Washington University in St. Louis

Spring 2020

February 21, 2020: 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 370
Shane Wang
Ivey Business School, Western University

Fall 2019

September 16, 2019: 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 415
Nicolas Padilla
Columbia University

September 18, 2019: 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Tommaso Bondi
New York University

September 25, 2019: 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Suh Yeon Kim, Emory University

October 4, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 260
Shreyans Goenka
Cornell University

October 11, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 570
Matt McGranaghan
Cornell University

October 16, 2019: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 240
Jennifer D’Angelo
University of Southern California

Spring 2019

February 1, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130
Darren Dahl, Senior Associate Dean, Faculty, Director of the Robert H. Lee Graduate School, BC Innovation Council Professor and Professor, Marketing and Behavioural Science Division
The University of British Columbia
Hurts So Good: Luxury Products Which Incur Environmental Costs are Preferred by Status Seeking Consumers

Darren Dahl is senior associate dean and the BC Innovation Council Professor of Marketing at the Sauder School of Business. He teaches courses in strategic marketing, entrepreneurship, and creativity. His research on product development and consumer behaviour has been presented at conferences internationally and is published in important business journals. He also consults widely for international organizations such as Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Lululemon Athletica, Xerox, and the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

Dahl was named a 2013 3M Teaching Fellow, Canada’s highest post-graduate teaching honour, and was a finalist in the Economist magazine’s Business Professor of the Year competition.

February 15, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130
Keith Wilcox, Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business,
Columbia Business School
The Effect of Resource Demands on Goal-Directed Behavior

Professor Wilcox’s research examines consumer judgment and decision-making, with a specific focus on the role of feelings in decision-making and self-control. He is also interested in understanding the factors that motivate consumers to purchase counterfeit and genuine luxury brands. He has published articles in the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Research. Additionally, his research has been featured in the New York Times, Time Magazine and Psychology Today. Professor Wilcox teaches a core marketing course to undergraduates and executive MBAs.

April 5, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130
J. Jeffrey  Inman, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty, Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing and Professor of Business Administration
University of Pittsburgh
What Drives Post-Level User Engagement? The Role of Sender-Reader Matching and the Moderating Effect of Online Social Ties

J. Jeffrey Inman is president of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and is past president of the Association for Consumer Research. He joined the faculty of the Katz School in 2000 as the Thomas Marshall Professor of Marketing. He was named the Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing in 2003. Prior to joining Katz, he was on the faculties at the University of Wisconsin (1994-2000) and the University of Southern California (1991-1994). He currently is on the editorial board of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Retailing. He is also an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Marketing.

Inman’s interests include consumer decision making, shopper marketing, and eating behaviors. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Journal of Marketing. Before entering academia, he worked at General Motors as a production supervisor and Texas Instruments Inc. as a semiconductor distribution manager.

May 3, 2019: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Gita Johar, Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business
Columbia Business School 
Combating Fake News: A Consumer Psychology Perspective

Gita V. Johar (Ph.D. NYU 1993; MBA Indian Institute of Management Calcutta 1985) has been on the faculty of Columbia Business School since 1992 and is currently the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business. She served as the school’s faculty director of online initiatives from 2014 to 2017, senior vice dean from 2011 to 2014, as the inaugural vice dean for research from 2010 to 2011, as director of the Columbia Business School Behavioral Lab from 2006 to 2011, and on Columbia University’s Institutional Review Board from 2002 to 2005. 

Johar also is the faculty director of the Design Your Innovation Blueprint Executive Education program, chair of the Faculty Steering Committee for the Columbia Global Centers | South Asia in Mumbai, and was the co-editor of the premier academic journal on consumer behavior, the Journal of Consumer Research from July 2014 to December 2017. 

Johar’s expertise lies in consumer psychology, focusing on how consumers react to marketing efforts, especially advertising, promotions and sponsorship. She also examines the influence of consumer self-control and perceptions of control on decision making and consumption. This research has implications for the design of effective communication strategies. She has published several influential articles in the areas of consumer persuasion and decision making in leading marketing and psychology journals. Johar also has published cases on consumer adoptions of new products and on marketing and advertising planning. She  teaches the core marketing course, as well as courses on advertising and branding, global immersion in India and Myanmar, research methods, and consumer behavior to MBA, Executive MBA, and Ph.D. students.   

May 10, 2019: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 350
Vishal Narayan, Associate Professor
NUS Business School
How Sociopolitical Phenomena Affect Consumer Behavior: Insights from “Big” and “Small” Data

I will present two papers, both of which study how sociopolitical events shape consumer behavior, but involve different research contexts, data structures and methods of consumer analysis. In the first paper, we study the impact of a mandated increase in minimum wages on consumer perceptions of multiple dimensions of service quality in the restaurants industry.  Based on textual data from 533,022 online reviews for 2,870 restaurants, we estimate a deep learning Word2Vec model to extract service quality perceptions. We then exploit a natural experiment in the County of Santa Clara, wherein only the city of San Jose legislated a 25% minimum wage increase in 2013. Using measures of perceived service quality as the dependent variable, we estimate a difference-in-difference model. We find an improvement in perceived service quality of San Jose restaurants. This improvement is restricted to specific dimensions of service quality and independent restaurants. The second paper focuses on developing economies which are characterized by substantial consumption of unbranded products. We study the effect of having a migrant household member, on the brand expenditure of rural households. We collect primary household level expenditure data from 30 villages in India, a country with an estimated 326 million internal migrants. Using propensity score matching, and coarsened exact matching, we find that as compared to matched control households, migrant sending households spend less on branded products. This effect is stronger in the short term and for poorer households. We discuss implications for brand managers and migration researchers. 

Fall 2018

August 28, 2018: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Anocha Aribarg, Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Faculty Fellow Associate Professor of Marketing
Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Consumer Responses to Native Advertising

Anocha Aribarg is an academic researcher and educator whose interests lie in fusing psychology and consumer behavior theories with Bayesian statistical modeling to draw unique insights that help solve current marketing problems. In her research, she attempts to understand the processes underlying how consumers make both individual and joint choice decisions, evaluate their consumption experiences and respond to firms’ product offerings and advertising. To understand such processes, she uses a combination of conjoint choice experiments, physiological measures (e.g., eye tracking, skin conductance), and observational data. Her research appears in the Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science. She serves on the Editorial Board of Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing and has also reviewed for Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Marketing and International Journal of Research in Marketing. She was an MSI Young Scholar and received the Sanford R. Robertson Research Award in 2009. She was recognized as the James R. and Mary Kay Hall Faculty Fellow in 2015. 

Prior to her academic life, she worked as a senior research executive for Taylor Nielsen Sofres (Thailand). She is hence passionate about teaching Marketing Research and Analytics at both the graduate and undergraduate levels at UM and enjoys research collaborations and conference participation with both academics and practitioners. She received a Ford-UM Innovation Alliance grant in 2008. She believes in the importance of marketing doctoral education and has served as on the MKT Doctoral Committee from 2006-2015 (Chair from 2011-2015).         

September 7, 2018: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 570
Praveen Kopalle, Associate Dean for the MBA Program, Signal Companies’ Professor of Management, Professor of Marketing,
Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College
Can’t Take the Heat? Field Experiments in Residential Electricity Conservation

Praveen Kopalle is Associate Dean for the MBA Program, Signal Companies’ Professor of Management, Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.  Praveen received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and B.E. from Osmania University.  Professor Kopalle’s teaching and research interests are in Marketing, Statistics, Pricing, new products/innovation, promotions, customer expectations, and e-commerce.  Praveen serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Retailing.  In addition, he is on the Editorial Boards of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Letters, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.  Praveen has won many awards including 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, 2015 Core Teaching Excellence Award, Winner, 2005 John Little Award etc. Praveen’s research has been published in many top-tier journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Retailing, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management.  He has been invited to speak at over fifty universities and institutes worldwide.

September 14, 2018: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 415
Rachel Gershon
Washington University in St. Louis
The Reputational Benefits and Material Burdens of Prosocial Referral Incentives

Abstract: Selfish incentives typically outperform prosocial incentives. However, this research identifies a context where prosocial incentives are more effective: customer referral programs. Companies frequently offer “selfish” incentives to customers who refer, incentivizing those customers directly for recruiting friends. However, companies can alternatively offer “prosocial” incentives that reward the referred friend instead. In multiple field and incentive-compatible experiments, this research finds that prosocial referrals, relative to selfish referrals, result in more new customers. This pattern occurs for two reasons. First, at the referral stage, customers expect to receive reputational benefits when making prosocial referrals within their social network, thereby boosting performance of prosocial referrals. Second, at the uptake stage, the burden of signing up is high, and therefore referral recipients prefer to receive an incentive themselves. Due to the combination of reputational benefits at the referral stage and action burdens at the uptake stage, prosocial referrals yield more new customers overall. The high frequency of selfish referral offers in the marketplace suggests these forces play out in ways that are unanticipated by marketers who design incentive schemes.  

September 24, 2018: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Michael O’Donnell
University of California, Berkeley
Preference Reversals in Willingness-to-Pay and Choice

Abstract: A fundamental contribution of consumer behavior research is to help marketing scholars develop an understanding of how people think about and express their preferences. In this article we find that two commonly used preference elicitation procedures, willingness to pay (WTP) and choice, are consistently associated with different expressed preferences. Specifically, choices are associated with a relatively greater preference for hedonic goods, while WTP is associated with a relatively greater preference for utilitarian goods. We find that this is caused, in part, by the greater reliance on deliberation in determining WTP values, while preferences in choices are determined by an affect heuristic. Unlike other choice and WTP preference reversals, we find that this effect is not caused by mechanical determinants such as scale compatibility, as the effect persists with continuous scale measures that rely on affect and with choice-based scale measures that rely on determining valuation.

September 26, 2018: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Kristen Duke
University of California, San Diego
Guilt Dynamics: Consequences of Temporally Separating Decisions and Actions

Abstract: The current research demonstrates that temporally separating a consumer’s initial decision to perform a guilt-inducing action from its actual enactment reduces the guilt felt while acting. This hypothesis follows from the development of a dynamic model that unpacks guilt into two distinct components. Initially, one experiences decision guilt accompanying the decision to act or the realization that one will act; subsequently, one experiences action guilt while engaging in the guilt-inducing behavior. Four experiments and two pilot studies reveal that introducing a temporal “decision-enactment gap” enables decision guilt to decay in this interim period, which lowers the overall guilt experienced upon acting. In line with the self-regulative function of guilt, decision-enactment gaps also increase indulgent consumption and decrease post-behavior atonement. This decoupling process can thus alleviate guilt that might otherwise detract from experiences, but may come at a cost to self-control efforts. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

October 3, 2018: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Longxiu Tian
University of Michigan
Broadening the Horizon: Augmenting One-Shot Field Experiments with Longitudinal Customer Data

Abstract: A commonplace customer acquisition strategy utilized by online subscription services involves offering price discounts targeted at new customers to induce initial conversion. As the initial contract choices can have long-run impact on customers’ subsequent renewal choices, setting new member pricing represents a tradeoff between running discounts steep enough to induce trial while attracting customers into contract options that maximize long-run CLV. However, problematic to conventional methods for measuring long-run effects of initial pricing, e.g., longitudinal A/B tests, is their time-consuming nature.

To address this shortcoming, we introduce a Bayesian nonparametric data fusion framework that expedite inference on the long-run effects of initial pricing using only a parsimonious ‘one-shot’ experiment on initial conversions, augmented with resubscription patterns found in longitudinal CRM databases. We develop a class of Gaussian process (GP) prior data fusion models that utilize Bayesian regularization as the mechanism for the sharing of information across the datasets at the customer-choice -occasion level. Our results show that in comparison to common longitudinal inference strategies for database marketing, including matching- and fixed-effect -based models, the proposed method improves CLV estimates on experimental participants by better capturing downstream preference heterogeneity. Moreover, as GP computationally scales cubically with observations, we leverage the sparse ‘inducing point’ approach for Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI), in a first-of-its-kind application of this highly scalable Bayesian estimation strategy in marketing, with applicability to a broad class of choice, response, and latent class models.

October 5, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 240
Maria Rodas
University of Minnesota
Paradox Brands: Can Brands with Contradictory Meanings be More Appealing to Consumers?

Abstract: Prevailing wisdom in marketing is that to be successful, brands should have a clear and distinct focus, without contradictory meanings that confuse consumers. We challenge this belief by showing that many consumers actually prefer brands that incorporate contradictory meanings, which we refer to as paradox brands. We present consumers with brand information, which includes brand personality traits and brand values, conveyed in written descriptions or advertisements. For paradox brands, these elements are contradictory, such as a rugged and sophisticated brand personality. For more traditional (non-paradox) brands, these elements are consistent, such as a rugged brand personality. Across five studies, we find that many consumers evaluate the paradox brand more favorably, in particular, consumers who are dialectical thinkers. We also find that the mechanism responsible for this effect is dialectical thinkers’ feeling that paradox brands fit their style of thinking, which views the world as inherently contradictory, resulting in more favorable evaluations for paradox brands. However, our findings also reveal that paradox brands lose their appeal in situations characterized by social risk, such as using a brand to signal one’s identity to others.

October 15, 2018: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Jaideep Sengupta, Chair Professor, Synergis-Geoffrey YEH Professor of Business,
HKUST Business School
The Loneliness of Prime Numbers — and Why Consumer Care

Prof Sengupta’s work has provided ground-breaking insights into many other areas, including decision-making, gender differences, how to improve self-control in the face of temptation, why optimism can lead to poor choices, and much else. His research excellence has seen Prof. Sengupta become one of the most-highly published scholars in the leading journals of his field, a distinguished record that places him in the topmost echelons of marketing academics worldwide. His thought leadership has received international honors and recognition, including by such prestigious bodies as the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. Prof Sengupta is a long-standing Associate Editor of the flagship journal in his field (Journal of Consumer Research) and serves on the Editorial Board at other leading journals.

October 24, 2018: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 510
Jimmy Lynn and Marty Conway
Georgetown University
Digital and Social Media Marketing 

Jimmy Lynn serves as a Senior Advisor and Adjunct Faculty in Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He also serves on the adjunct faculty in our Sports Industry Management program in the School of Continuing Studies. He is one of the pioneers in the digital sports sector and regarded as one of the leading relationship brokers and connectors in the sports industry.

Marty Conway has been at the forefront of sports marketing and digital media for more than three decades., holding executive roles in high profile organizations, including AOL, Major League Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers.

November 2, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230
Shibo Li, Gibbs Professor and Professor of Marketing
Indiana University
The Dynamics of Shopper Engagement and Purchase Conversion at Retail Checkout

November 9, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230
Sungho Park
Arizona State University
The Incremental Impact of Digital Ad Impressions in Retargeting under Programmatic Real-Time Bidding: Accounting for the Count-Quality Simultaneity Bias 

Sungho Park is an associate professor of marketing at W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. He has been with Arizona State University since 2010. He holds a PhD in Management (Marketing) from Cornell University, an MS in management engineering from KAIST (South Korea), and a BA in linguistics from Seoul National University (South Korea).

Professor Park is interested in studying consumers’ shopping behaviors in various retail settings. His research also includes developing new statistical models which measure the effectiveness of marketing actions and account for consumers’ decision making behaviors. Currently, he is studying consumers’ mobile applications and digital goods usage behaviors. He has published papers in premier academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, MIS Quarterly, and Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. He was named a finalist for the 2014 William F. O’Dell Award for the most impactful Journal of Marketing Research paper and a 2017 Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute.

Spring 2018

February 2, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230
Punam Anand Keller, Associate Dean For Innovation and Growth; Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management, 
Dartmouth College
The Role of Emotional Nudges to Enhance Individual Responsibility for Health and Saving Decisions

Punam Anand Keller is an expert in consumer information processing and choice behavior. She works with companies, foundations, and government agencies who are interested in changing health and saving behaviors. Her current research—supported by the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Endowment for Financial Education—focuses on designing and implementing consumer communication programs. Her research on decision making was cited in a White House report on the use of behavioral science in the design of Federal programs and policies. She teaches cause marketing (marketing causes in for-profit companies) and social marketing (marketing in governments and not-for-profit companies). 

February 9, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 370
Asim M. Ansari, William T. Dillard Professor of Marketing
Columbia University
Probabilistic Topic Model for Hybrid Recommender Systems: A Stochastic Variational Bayesian Approach

Asim Ansari’s research address customer relationship management, customization of marketing activities and product recommendations over the Internet, social networks modeling, and Bayesian modeling of consumer actions. Prior to joining Columbia in 1996, Ansari was with the University of British Columbia, Canada. Ansari has several publications in leading journals in marketing and allied fields. His research has appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Psychometrika. 

Ansari is the recipient of the Paul Green Award from the American Marketing Association (1994) for his work on ecustomization, His other work has been nominated for the O’Dell Award (2005 and 2007), Paul Green Award (2003 and 2008), and the Long Term Impact Award from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (2009). Ansari serves as an associate editor for Management Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and is on the editorial board of Marketing Science. He teaches the core marketing course and Ph.D. courses on empirical modeling and Bayesian methods in marketing. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence (2009).

February 23, 2018: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 150
Eesha Sharma, Associate Professor of Business Administration
Dartmouth College
Too Constrained to Converse: Financial Constraints Reduce Purchase-Related Word-of-Mouth

Eesha Sharma is associate professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business and the Paul E. Raether T’73 Faculty Fellow. Sharma’s research revolves around consumer financial wellbeing and how psychology and marketing can be used to understand and improve it. She is particularly interested in how people react to perceived scarcity, poverty, and deprivation—both in their own lives and in the lives of others. Using a combination of behavioral experiments and field studies, she examines topics such as: how people behave when they feel poor, why people give to charity, and what factors may improve and/or worsen consumer financial decision making. Her work has been published in top journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. She teaches two graduate-level courses: the MBA Consumer Behavior elective at the Tuck School of Business, and the MEM core Marketing course at the Thayer School of Engineering.

March 23, 2018: 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130
Anuj K. Shah, Associate Professor of Behavioral Science
University of Chicago
Deciding Who Gets What, Fairly

Anuj K. Shah studies the psychology that arises from facing resource scarcity. In one line of work, he studies how being short on money and time affects decision-making. In another line of work, he studies how behavioral science can help shape interventions to reduce crime and violence.

His research has appeared in Science, Psychological Science, and Psychological Bulletin, among other journals. He also is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at ideas42, a social science research and development laboratory that uses scientific insights to design innovative policies and products. 

Shah earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University, where he received teaching awards from the psychology department and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

April 20, 2018: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130
Carl Mela, T. Austin Finch Foundation Professor of Marketing
Duke University
Advertiser Learning in an Internet Ad Network

Carl F. Mela is the T. Austin Finch Foundation Professor of Marketing at Duke University. He holds an engineering degree from Brown University and a Ph.D. in marketing from Columbia University. Prior to his Ph.D., he held management positions at Hewlett Packard, Hughes Space and Communications, and Proxima Corporation. 

Mela applies economic and statistical models to generate insights regarding the long-term effects of marketing activity on brand equity, as well as the role the Internet and new media on consumer and firm behavior. Articles along these lines appear in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Consumer Research and have received or been a finalist for 30 best paper awards including the INFORMS John D.C. Little Award and the American Marketing Association’s William O’Dell and Paul Green Awards. 

Mela serves or has served as an associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research and Quantitative Marketing and Economics and is on the editorial boards of the Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Letters. Professional boards include the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Unilever and Information Resources, Incorporated.

Fall 2017

September 15, 2017: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230 
Ryan Dew, Marketing Ph.D. student
Columbia University
Bayesian Nonparametric Customer Base Analysis with Model-based Visualizations

Abstract: Marketing managers are responsible for understanding and predicting customer purchasing activity, a task that is complicated by a lack of knowledge of all of the calendar time events that influence purchase timing. Yet, isolating calendar time variability from the natural ebb and flow of purchasing is important, both for accurately assessing the influence of calendar time shocks to the spending process and for uncovering the customer-level patterns of purchasing that robustly predict future spending. A comprehensive understanding of purchasing dynamics therefore requires a model that flexibly integrates both known and unknown calendar time determinants of purchasing with individual-level predictors such as interpurchase time, customer lifetime, and number of past purchases. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian nonparametric framework based on Gaussian process priors, which integrates these two sets of predictors by modeling both through latent functions that jointly determine purchase propensity. The estimates of these latent functions yield a visual representation of purchasing dynamics, which we call the model-based dashboard, that provides a nuanced decomposition of spending patterns. We show the utility of this framework through an application to purchasing in free-to-play mobile video games. Moreover, we show that in forecasting future spending, our model outperforms existing benchmarks. 

September 18, 2017: 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360
Robert Mislavsky, Marketing Ph.D. student
University of Pennsylvania
When Risk is Weird: Unexplained Transaction Features Lower Valuations  

Abstract: We define transactions as weird when they include unexplained features, that is, features not implicitly, explicitly, or self-evidently justified, and propose that people are averse to weird transactions. In six experiments, we show that risky options used in previous research paradigms often attained uncertainty via adding an unexplained transaction feature (e.g., purchasing a coin flip or lottery), and behavior that appears to reflect risk aversion could instead reflect an aversion to weird transactions. Specifically, willingness to pay drops just as much when adding risk to a transaction as when adding unexplained features. Holding transaction features constant, adding additional risk does not further reduce willingness to pay. We interpret our work as generalizing ambiguity aversion to riskless choice. 

September 22, 2017: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360 
Francesca Valsesia, Marketing Ph.D. student
University of South California 
The Sideline Effect – How Partitioning an Audience Facilitates Self-Presentation Objectives

Abstract: This work establishes audience partitioning as a distinct self-presentation strategy that consumers use in an attempt to solve what is known as the self-promotion dilemma: how to share self-enhancing content without being perceived as overtly attention-seeking. Audience partitioning involves dividing audience members into two categories, addressed and non-addressed recipients. By addressing self-enhancing content to one or more designated recipients, the recipients not addressed are put on the sideline, assuming the role of bystanders. Across a series of laboratory studies and the analysis of secondary data, we demonstrate how consumers use audience partitioning strategically. First, we document that individuals are more likely to use audience partitioning when sharing self-enhancing (vs. not self-enhancing) content. Next, we present evidence that people engage in audience partitioning because they expect to be perceived as less attention-seeking and therefore expect to make a better impression on bystanders. This ultimately increases their likelihood of sharing self-enhancing content. In other words, we show how the use of audience partitioning helps promote word-of-mouth communication in contexts where the self-promotion dilemma might otherwise inhibit consumers from talking about their possessions and consumption experiences.

October 20, 2017: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230 
Liu Liu, Marketing Ph.D. student
New York University
Visual Listening In: Extracting Brand Image Portrayed on Social Media

Abstract: Marketing academics and practitioners recognize the importance of monitoring consumer online conversations about brands. The focus so far has been on user generated content in the form of text. However, images are on their way to surpassing text as the medium of choice for social conversations. In these images, consumers often tag brands and depict their experience with the brands. We propose a “visual listening in” approach to measuring how brands are portrayed on social media (Instagram) by mining visual content posted by users, and show what insights brand managers can gather from social media by using this approach. Our approach consists of two stages. We first use two supervised machine learning methods, support vector machine classifiers and deep convolutional neural networks, to measure brand attributes (glamorous, rugged, healthy, fun) from images. We then apply the classifiers to brand-related images posted on social media to measure what consumers are visually communicating about brands. We study 56 brands in the apparel and beverages categories, and compare their portrayal in consumer-created images with images on the firm’s official Instagram account, as well as with consumer brand perceptions measured in a national brand survey. Although the three measures exhibit convergent validity, we find key differences between how consumers and firms portray the brands on visual social media, and how the average consumer perceives the brands.

November 3, 2017: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230 
Lauren Grewal, Marketing Ph.D. student
University of Pittsburgh
When Posting About Products in Social Media Backfires: The Negative Effects of Consumer Identity-Signaling on Desire to Purchase 

Abstract: One way that consumers express themselves is through posting about products in social media. From an identity perspective, consumers use products to signal their identities, and posting products in social media is a way to virtually signal ones’ identity. Counterintuitively, by doing this, a consumer’s desire to purchase products may be reduced if the social media posting fulfills their identity-signaling needs. Six experiments examine how and why posting products on social media can impact a consumer’s interest in purchasing those and similar products. The findings show that identity-signaling through product posting in social media decreases a consumer’s desire to purchase. This occurs when product posts allow consumers to self-verify and signal their identity to others, which results in lower purchase intent because the posting obviates the need to purchase the same or similar identity-relevant products that would achieve the same signaling purpose. These findings have important implications for how firms conduct social media marketing, which often aims to get consumers to virtually engage with their products by posting about and sharing them. 

November 10, 2017: 2 – 3:30 p.m.
Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360 
Zoey Chen, Assistant Professor of Marketing
University of Miami
Social Acceptance and Word of Mouth: How the Motive to Belong leads to Divergent WOM with Strangers and Friends

Abstract: Consumers are increasingly sharing product experiences with strangers and friends online. Despite the prevalence of word of mouth (WOM), little is known about how and why WOM differs based on whether people are talking to strangers or friends. The current paper theorizes that one important motivation for WOM is social acceptance. To fulfill this motivation, people form and maintain existing relationships with others. Building on research in interpersonal relationships, we theorize that when communicating with strangers, people attempt to self-enhance to attract strangers into forming relationships with the self; when sharing with friends, on the other hand, people attempt to connect emotionally in order to maintain existing ties. A series of seven studies provide backing for this simple yet encompassing framework.Results of the current paper provide insights into the motivations behind WOM, synthesize prior findings and show that people systematically share different content with strangers versus friends. The current paper makes theoretical contributions to research in interpersonal communication, social influence and WOM, and holds practical implications for marketers interested in understanding consumer word of mouth.

Spring 2017

The Evolution of Television Viewing: Social TV, Time-Shifted Viewing and Advertising Responsiveness 

January 27, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130

David A. Schweidel, associate professor of marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University

David Schweidel joined the Goizueta Business School faculty in 2012 where he is co-director of the Emory Marketing Analytics Center (EmoryMAC). His research focuses on the development and application of statistical models to understand customer behavior, specifically in the context of customer relationship management and customer valuation. His current research explores the use of social media as a means of marketing intelligence. His research has appeared in publications including Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Marketing. He completed his Ph.D. at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Prior to joining Goizueta, he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. While at the Wisconsin School of Business, he received junior faculty research and teaching awards. He was invited to participate in the Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI) biennial Young Scholar Program in 2011 and received MSI’s best paper award in 2014. Schweidel is co-author of Social Media Intelligence and author of Profiting from the Data Economy. 

The Supply Chain Order Effect: How the Timing of Production and Purchase Impacts Consumption of Unethical Products

February 3, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 250

Neeru Paharia, assistant professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

Neeru Paharia is an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She conducts research on judgment and decision making, consumer behavior, signaling through brands, social media, political consumption, moral psychology, and digital marketing. Prior to joining the Georgetown McDonough faculty, Paharia served as the research director for the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She also spent three years on the founding team at Creative Commons serving as assistant and executive director, after working at McKinsey as an associate consultant. She has cofounded several community-oriented social networking sites in education, research, and music including Peer 2 Peer University (p2pu.org), Acawiki.org, and ccmixter.org. 

Paharia’s work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and she has authored several book chapters. She holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Harvard Business School, a Master of Science in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of California.

Two Papers in Search of Titles

February 24, 2017, 11a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 240

Kurt Carlson, professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

Professor Carlson is the director of the Georgetown Institute for Consumer Research and co-Director of the McDonough School of Business Behavioral Research Lab. In his research, he studies how people make decisions. His published research can be found in top marketing, psychology, and management journals. He is also the co-author of “Contemporary Brand Management” (with Johny Johansson). He blogs for Psychology Today and Forbes, and maintains an active Twitter account (@ProfKurt). 

Professor Carlson attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986-1993 (B.S. and M.S. degrees), and he received his Ph.D from Cornell University in 2001. He has been at Georgetown since 2009, where he has taught Analytical Problem Solving, Consumer Behavior, and Marketing Management. He received the 2010 MSB Dean’s Distinguished Faculty Research Award and the 2012 Publication Award from the Decision Analysis Society. 

Consumption Across Time: Three Case Studies 

March 22, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 415

Adam Alter, associate professor of marketing, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University

Adam Alter is an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University psychology department. Professor Alter’s research focuses on judgment and decision-making and social psychology, with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle cues in the environment on human cognition and behavior. His research has been published in, among other journals, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.Professor Alter’s studies have been featured on CNBC, PBS and BBC Radio, and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist and Newsweek.

Professor Alter is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, which examines how features of the world shape our thoughts and feelings beyond our control. His second book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, explores why so many people today are addicted to technology-driven behaviors (social media, emailing, work, videogames etc.), and how we might address such behavioral addictions. Irresistible will be published in early 2017. He has also written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications. Professor Alter received his B.Sc. (Honors Class 1, University Medal) in Psychology from the University of New South Wales and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University, where he held the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Dissertation Fellowship and a Fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.

Good Vibrations: Consumer Responses to Technology-Mediated Haptic Feedback

March 31, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 350

Ana Valenzuela, associate professor of marketing, Zicklin School of Business 

Ana Valenzuela, Ph.D., is professor of marketing at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College and “Profesor Titular” at the Department of Marketing of ESADE Business School. She has also served as a faculty member at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley), INSEAD, Santa Clara University, China-Europe International Business School, Hong Kong Science and Technology University, Singapore Institute of Management, San Francisco State University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Instituto de Empresa.

Ana began her professional career with AC Nielsen, serving as a marketing consultant for multi-country projects dealing with consumer goods markets. In addition, she worked in marketing research projects for PubliEspana (TV5), The Advisory Board Company, Hello America and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

She has published widely, her articles on behavioral decision-making and cross-cultural consumer behavior appearing in numerous leading journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and International Marketing Review.

Ana is a frequent keynote speaker on topics related with consumer psychology and in-store strategies and was recognized by the Marketing Science Institute in the United States as a must-read author in her field. She is a member of several academic associations as well as marketing institutions and think-tanks.

Prof. Valenzuela holds a Ph.D. from University of Madrid, Autonoma and an MBA from Georgetown University. She was a Research Fellow at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley for three years.

Bidding Frenzy: Speed of Competitor Reaction and Willingness to Pay in Auctions 

April 7, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230

Gerald Haubl, Ronald K. Banister Chair in Business and professor of marketing, Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta

Professor Gerald Häubl obtained his Ph.D. in Marketing at the Vienna University of Business and Economics. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Science at the University of Alberta, and he is a Research Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at the Institute for Customer Insight.

A significant portion of Gerald Häubl’s research is aimed at advancing our understanding of the psychological processes that govern what people choose to consume and how they experience the outcomes of these choices. He has also done extensive work on consumer decision making in technology-mediated environments and on decision assistance for consumers.

Professor Häubl has published in leading journals in the fields of marketing, psychology, and information systems, as well as in important outlets in some areas of computing science. In particular, his research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Retailing, Psychological Science, Psychometrika, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, the MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, among other journals.

The research-related awards Professor Gerald Häubl has received include the 2012 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the 2000 Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award.

Self-Control and the Meaning of Choice

April 21, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230 — Cancelled

Aner Sela, John I. Williams, Jr. Professor, associate professor, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida

Aner Sela is John I. Williams, Jr., Professor and Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Business from Stanford University.

Dr. Sela’s research focuses on how people make decisions and form evaluations. His work highlights how everyday decisions both shape and are shaped by people’s subjective experiences of difficulty, their lay-theories and intuitions, and spontaneous inference making. He was ranked among the Top 50 Most Productive Marketing Authors in 2013, and chosen as a Young Scholar for 2015 by the Marketing Science Institute.

Positive Satisfaction-Response Bias in Surveys: Understanding Reciprocity, Venting and Exiting in the Brand-Consumer Relationship 

May 5, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 155

Chris Hydock, assistant professor of research, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University 

Chris Hydock is an assistant professor of research and the research director of the Georgetown Institute for Consumer Research. He earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Psychology Department at George Washington University and B.A. in Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  In addition to conducting research on consumer behavior, he is helping to further develop the behavioral research lab for the McDonough School of Business.

Of Angels and Father Time: A Construal Story

June 14, 2017, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 350                                                             

Eunice Kim, assistant professor of marketing, Pennsylvania State University. 

 Professor Eunice Kim is an assistant professor of marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.  Kim conducts research in the area of consumer decision making. Her current research interests are goals, mindsets, context effects, and self-control. Her research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Marketing Research

Overly Tailored Gift Giving: Givers Choose More Constrained and Less Preferred Gifts

June 23, 2017, 203:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360   

Mary Steffel, assistant professor of marketing, Northeastern University 

Professor Steffel’s research is at the interface of consumer behavior, social psychology, and judgment and decision making. She employs experimental research methods to examine when consumers call upon others to help them make decisions, identify the barriers to accurately gauging others’ preferences and effectively choosing on their behalf, and determine how these barriers can be overcome. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Medical Decision Making, and Health Psychology. She teaches Consumer Behavior at the masters and undergraduate levels.

Fall 2016

Goal Conflict Encourages Work and Discourages Leisure

September 16, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360

Jordan Etkin, assistant professor of marketing, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Jordan Etkin is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Jordan’s research centers on consumer motivation, variety, time, and the intersections between them. Her work has appeared in top consumer behavior research outlets, including the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research, as well as popular media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Huffington Post. Jordan received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Maryland. She teaches Marketing Intelligence to Masters of Management Studies and MBA students at Fuqua.

Does it Pay to Be Truthful? Understanding the Role of Authenticity in TV Advertising

October 7, 1:30-3:00 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Bluilding, Room 145

Werner Reinartz, director of Center for Research in Retailing and professor of marketing, University of Cologne

Werner Reinartz is a professor of marketing at the University of Cologne, Germany. Furthermore, he is the director of Center for Research in Retailing (IFH), one of the largest applied research centers in the Faculty of Management and Economics. Furthermore, he is the speaker of the research initiative “Digital Transformation and Value Creation” at the University of Cologne and the speaker of the Business Administration Faculty. Previously, he was the Cora Chaired Professor of Retailing and Management and associate professor of marketing at INSEAD, France. Professor Reinartz holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Houston (1999).

His research interest and expertise focuses on the subjects of marketing strategy, retailing, customer management, advertising effectiveness, and channel management. In particular, he is interested in the questions of how firms can compete successfully in mature markets, marketing mix efficiency and effectiveness, and the successful management of lasting, profitable customer relationships. Professor Reinartz has worked with a large number of international companies such as for example IBM (Germany), Allianz (Germany), the Cora Group (France), GfK (Germany), ABN AMRO (Netherlands), Spiegel (USA), METRO (Germany), Henkel (Germany), AKBANK (Turkey), Comdirect Bank (Germany), CGG (France), The Nielsen Company (Germany) and ThyssenKrupp (Germany). In addition, he has conducted extensively executive training programs for many Fortune500 and EuroStoxx50 companies.

Beyond the Target Customer: Social effects of CRM Campaigns

October 21, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 370

Oded Netzer, associate professor of business, Columbia Business School

Professor Netzer’s research centers on one of the major business challenges of the data-rich environment of the 21st century: developing quantitative methods that leverage data to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and guide firms’ decisions. He focuses primarily on building statistical and econometric models to measure consumer preferences and understand how customer choices change over time, and across contexts. His research has won multiple awards and has been published in the leading scholarly journals. He serves on the editorial board of several leading journals including: Marketing Science, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economic, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Oded teaches the core marketing course to MBA and undergraduate students, a course in Marketing Research to MBA and Executive MBA students, a doctoral course on empirical research in marketing, as well as several executive education programs.

Consumer and Object Experience in the Internet of Things: An Assemblage Theory Approach

November 4, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360

Donna Hoffman, professor of marketing, The George Washington School of Business
Thomas Novak, professor of marketing, The George Washington School of Business

Donna L. Hoffman is the Louis Rosenfeld Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing at The George Washington School of Business in Washington, D.C. Professor Hoffman is an internationally recognized academic expert and sought after industry speaker in the areas of social media, online consumer behavior, and digital marketing trends and has worked with major corporations on the topic of digital marketing strategy, including Procter & Gamble, Intel, Microsoft, FedEx.com, Land’s End/Sears, Walmart.com, and many others. She also serves as an Academic Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute and is a member of the Procter & Gamble Digital Advisory Board.

Professor Hoffman’s research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute. She has been awarded many of the field’s most prestigious research awards, including the Robert B. Clarke Educator of the Year Award from the DMEF, the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for long-term contributions to the discipline of marketing, the Stellner Distinguished Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, the William O’Dell/Journal of Marketing Research Award for long-term research impact and the Robert D. Buzzell Marketing Science Institute Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. She is also an MSI “Challenges of Communications and Branding in a Digital Era” research proposal competition winner and was recently named a finalist for the Paul D. Converse Award, for her lasting contributions to the marketing field.

Thomas P. Novak is the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing at The George Washington School of Business in Washington, DC, which he joined in 2013. Professor Novak’s research since 1993 has focused exclusively on consumer behavior in online environments and digital marketing. His current research interests deal with using assemblage theory, anthropomorphism and topological data analysis (TDA) to understand consumer experience in the smart home and the Internet of Things.

Over the past two decades he co-founded and co-directed a series of research centers (Project 2000, eLab, and the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing) with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation and 40 other corporate sponsors including Walmart.com, Netscape, Procter & Gamble, and Hershey’s.

Upselling versus Upsetting Customers? A Model of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Incentives

November 18, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230

Jian Ni, associate professor, John Hopkins University 

Jian Ni is an associate professor at Carey Business School with joint appointment in the Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in empirical and theoretical analysis of healthcare and pharmaceutical, environmental and energy, financial service, and technology markets. His work is supported by National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Center for Global Health, Environment, Energy, Sustainability and Health Institute, China Medical Board, among others. He has published in top business and healthcare journals. He was named a 2017 MSI Young Scholar. 

Individual Differences in Affective Forecasting Accuracy Affect Consumer Self-Regulation

December 2, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 370

Cait Lamberton, Ben L. Fryrear Chair of Marketing and associate professor of marketing, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh

Professor Lamberton’s research focuses on consumer behavior, from both an individual and socially-embedded perspective. Beginning with her dissertation work, Cait and her coauthors have researched the ways in which consumers respond to varying assortment sizes and organizations. She has also conducted research on consumers’ own categorization tendencies, studying the ways in which they may be motivated to categorize items differently in the interest of their own restriction or indulgence goals. New research explores consumer behavior at an interpersonal and societal level. This work includes consideration of consumers’ responses to online and offline social presence, decision-making in dyads, willingness to share products, the consequences of cooperation or competition, and satisfaction with contribution to the support of public goods.

Her work has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research,Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Current Opinion in Psychology,Journal of Retailing and Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Cait is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology and a Senior Editor at the International Journal of Research in Marketing. She was selected as a Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute, received the Association for Consumer’s Research’s Early Career Award for distinguished scholarly contributions, and received the American Marketing Association’s Erin Anderson Award, which recognizes an outstanding female researcher and mentor.

Promotion Mobile Change Usage: Balancing Channel Substitution and Customer Relationship Management 

December 16, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 370

Vithala Rao, Deane W. Malott Professor of Management and professor of marketing, Cornell University 

Professor Rao is the Deane W. Malott Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods in Johnson School of Management, Cornell University. His research interests lie in the development and application of analytical models for marketing research and marketing strategy.  His publications have dealt with such topics as, dynamic pricing; product positioning and product design; application of multidimensional scaling and conjoint models for the analysis of consumer preferences and perceptions; market structure analysis; brand equity; acquisition; evaluation of subsets of multi-attributed items.

He received Johnson’s 2000-01 Faculty Research Award and the 2005 Robert D. Buzzell Award for the Best Paper by the Marketing Science Institute. He recently received the 2008 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award presented by the American Marketing Association and the American Marketing Association Foundation recognizing his “outstanding leadership and sustained impact on advancing the evolving profession of marketing research over an extended period of time”. He was elected the ISMS Fellow in 2012. He will be inducted as an AMA Fellow in February 2016.

He has consulted for various industrial firms and is currently engaged in research on issues associated with preannouncement strategies, price bundling, choices of bundles, resource allocation, and competitive reactions. He serves on the editorial boards of Customer Needs and Solutions (as a Senior Editor), Journal of Marketing (as an Associate Editor), Journal of Marketing Research (as a reviewer), Marketing Science (as a reviewer) and Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (as a reviewer). He is also an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including Management Science. He is currently the Chair of the Marketing Strategy Committee of INFORMS.

Spring 2016

January 15, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130

Suzanne Shu, associate professor of marketing, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Suzanne Shu’s research investigates how individuals form judgments and make decisions in uncertain environments. She is especially interested in judgments and decisions that occur over long timeframes. The types of decisions analyzed in her research include consumer self-control problems and consumption timing issues, with important implications for both negative behaviors (such as procrastination) and positive behaviors (such as saving). A central application of her research is in explaining how consumers make decisions about financial products such as mortgages, annuities, personal savings, and investments. Her expertise in this area has led to presentations at industry and public policy conferences (Behavioral Finance Forum, Tobin Project), membership in working groups on consumer finance at the Sage and Sloan Foundations and the Federal Reserve Board, and financial support by the Sloan Foundation to pursue research on annuity choice.

Professor Shu received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004, where her studies included behavioral economics, decision sciences, and marketing. Her dissertation research on consumers’ propensity to delay certain types of consumption won awards from the Marketing Science Institute and the State Farm Companies Foundation. She also holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. In addition to her work in academia, Professor Shu has worked as a product line manager, an IT project manager, and as a management consultant in sales force design. She also consults for financial services companies and insurance providers on behavioral influences on consumers’ financial decisions.

Attentional Bias for Food and Alcohol Cues After Exposure to Commercial Advertising

January 29, 2-3:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 160

Keitiline Viacava, post doctoral fellow, Georgetown University Medical Center

Dr. Viacava’s research interests and academic investigations involve human cognition and behavioral research. Her work places an emphasis on the nuances of both consumer neuroscience and managerial behavior.

February 19, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 230

Theodore Noseworthy, associate professor, Schulich School of Business, York University

The primary focus of Dr. Noseworthy’s research and teaching is in the area of new product design and innovation. This work focuses predominantly on how people make sense of new innovative products and how marketers can better facilitate adoption. His theoretical interests are in the area of product categorization, category ambiguity, and visual processing.

Some of his recent projects include exploring gender differences in the processing of visually incongruent products, exploring how consumers trade-off dominant product features for perceptual identity, exploring how certain types of positioning tactics influence how consumers make sense of visually incongruent products, and exploring how people make inferences based on the visual appearance of currency.

March 21, 1-2:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 360

Anja Lambrecht, assistant professor of marketing, London Business School

Dr Anja Lambrecht teaches the elective programme, ‘Going to Market: Managing the Channel and Sales Force’ to MBA and Executive MBA students. Her research focuses on the different aspects of pricing strategy; the adoption of services and technologies; and online advertising and electronic markets.

She received her Ph.D. from Goethe University, Frankfurt. She also holds a Diplom-Kauffrau from Goethe University, Frankfurt and a Maîtrise des Sciences de Gestion from Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris.

Before becoming assistant professor of marketing at London Business School, she was a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management from 2005-2007, and a visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business from 2004-2005.

Dr Lambrecht’s work has been published in a number of leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Marketing Research. And before embarking on her Ph.D. she worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Frankfurt.

April 15, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130

Monica Wadhwa, assistant professor of marketing, INSEAD

Monica Wadhwa is an assistant professor of marketing at INSEAD. She joined in July 2009, after receiving a Ph.D. in marketing from the Stanford University. She has also received a master’s in human resources management from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in India and Bachelors in Sociology (Honours) from Delhi University in India. 

Monica’s research primarily focuses on consumer motivation and reward-seeking behaviours, non-conscious mental processes in consumer decision-making and emotion regulation. Her work demonstrates that a pleasant sample (such as, a brief taste of a refreshing drink) not only enhances one’s desire for the sampled item (refreshing drink), but leads to a generalized craving for a broader range of rewarding experiences (e.g., a vacation in Bora Bora, a massage experience etc.), a phenomenon termed as “reverse-alliesthesia.” In her recent work, she examines the impact of incidental brief experiences with hedonic cues on the pursuit of unrelated goal states. Her work has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Her work on reverse-alliesthesia has received a Citation of Excellence award from Emerald Management Reviews as the top 50 management articles of 2008.

April 22, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130

Pinar Yildirim, assistant professor of marketing, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Pinar Yildirim is assistant professor of marketing and senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute. Pinar’s research interests are on media and information economics. She focuses on analytical modeling and in particular is interested in game theoretic models. Parallel to these interests, her current research focuses on two-sided networks, data markets, and social networks. Related to her interests of ‘political economy’ she is also conducting research on the impact of media on political outcomes.

Professor Yildirim’s research appeared in top management and marketing journals including Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Journal of Marketing, and has received numerous grants and honors. Yildirim has industrial experience in consumer electronics and automotive sectors, at firms such as Fiat S.P.A and Renault S.A. She also conducted research in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline and PNC Bank, and currently she is conducting research in collaboration with the American Red Cross and Social Bicycles.

Professor Yildirim earned her Ph.D. in marketing and business economics from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. She also holds a Ph.D. degree in engineering. She is teaching Marketing Research at The Wharton School and is a frequent contributor for Knowledge @Wharton and Wharton Business Radio, and is a contributor for Google Think Insights.

May 11, 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Rafik B. Hariri Building, Room 130

Raghuram Iyengar, associate professor of marketing, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Raghu Iyengar’s research investigates how consumers respond to nonlinear pricing schemes. Recently, Iyengar considered the impact of nonlinear pricing schemes within wireless services and modeled how consumers learn about their own consumption as well as the quality of a service provider. He found that both quality and quantity learning are important factors of the model and this dual learning, in turn, affects consumers’ choice of service plans and consumption of minutes. He also found that that about 90 percent of quality learning takes place within the first five service encounters. This suggests that the first few service encounters are critical for firms as consumers rapidly form beliefs about the quality of a firm’s service from these first impressions.

Professor Iyengar’s other current research projects focus on optimal design of nonlinear pricing schemes using conjoint analysis, semiparametric methods for modeling heterogeneity, and structural models of social networks. His research has been published or forthcoming in Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Psychometrika, Quantitative and Marketing Economics and Experimental Economics.

Professor Iyengar’s teaching interests are in the area of Marketing Research. He earned earned his Ph.D. and master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University and his bachelor’s degree in technology from IIT Kanpur, India.