Download Consortium Fellows PDF - 2016 AMA

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Chethana Achar
University of Washington
I am a third year consumer behavior student.
My research interests broadly lie in examining
the difficult tradeoffs consumers make between
‘rational’ health decisions and what it implies to their
self-concept. In one project, I study how vaccination
appeals that reference stigmatized risk factors
backfire, even when presented with long-term, lowrisk health solutions. Another stream on work focuses on how consumers’
motivation to protect their freedom of choice leads to reduced healthy
behavior as a response to health messages. Both these topics present
interesting contexts of study where consumers compromise their health,
not as a result of lowered self-regulation, rather, to protect their concept
of self. I have an MBA in Marketing and have worked as a Brand Manager
with a consumer goods firm. I enjoy gardening, hiking and reading.
Arvind Agrawal
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Arvind Agrawal is a third year Doctoral Candidate
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). His
research interests are in the consumer payments
area with a focus on the influence of payment types
on consumer purchase behavior. Prior to joining
the doctoral program, Arvind worked for 28 years
in the IT and finance industries both in India and
in Singapore. Thereafter, he taught MBA classes for four years in India.
Arvind developed and delivered a course to the undergraduate students
at UNL titled “Marketing Metrics” and has received a teaching award. He published a book with Cambridge Scholars, UK, titled “How India
Found its Feet: The story of Indian Business Leadership and value
creation – 1991-2010.” He has published in the Journal of Business
Research (2016) - Dimensions and Contingent Effects of Variable
Compensation System Changes and at international conferences in
Teheran (2012) - Educating the Girl Child, Filling the Inequality Gap, and
in India (2001) - How to Structure a Customer Focused IT Organization to
support CRM. He presented two papers at the Winter AMA Conference
2016 - Conceptualizing the Prosocial Orientation of a Firm, and Weight
Loss Advertising: Moving from Claim Credibility Control to Performance
Focus in Public Policy.
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Md. Al-Emran
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Md. Al-Emran is a Doctoral Candidate (in Marketing)
and an Instructor at the Lubar School of Business,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is intended
to meet the completion requirements for his PhD
degree in the Spring 2017. Emran’s research
interests broadly relate in the area of Consumer
Behavior and Marketing Strategy. His recent paper
has been accepted to publish in the recognized journal and two other
working papers on customer satisfaction are also in the submission
stage. Mr. Emran holds MBA in Marketing & BA(Hons) in Economics
from A.M. University, India. He also holds another MBA (Marketing)
from the University of New Orleans, Louisiana. He has work experience
of 12 years, comprising of 2 years in the industry, and 10 years in the
academia where he taught the business courses in the university both
for undergraduate and graduate business classes. Mr. Emran published
jointly in the Int’l conference in Malaysia. His conference participation
also includes SMS at Ole Miss, Oxford, Mississippi; SMA in Atlanta,
Georgia. He is the Ad-hoc reviewer of Academy of Marketing Science
Conference’16. Mr. Emran was nominated twice for the Distinguished
Graduate Student Fellowship award by the Scholarship Committee of
Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2012 &
2013 respectively.
B.J. Allen
University of Texas at San Antonio
B.J. Allen is a doctoral candidate at the University
of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on
new product strategy, innovation, and marketing
strategy in networked markets. B.J.’s dissertation
highlights how firms can leverage those outside
the organization during new product development,
and how firms can better holistically measure new
product performance. His research has been published in the Journal of
Retailing and is under second-round review in the Journal of Marketing.
He won the PDMA Dissertation Proposal Competition in 2016. He won
best in-track paper awards at the 2015 Winter and 2015 Summer
AMA Educator’s Conferences and the best reviewer award at 2015
PDMA Research Forum. Prior to joining the doctoral program at UTSA,
B.J. received a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and
worked in marketing analytics at Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sears Holdings,
and Overstock.com. He also served a two-year church mission in
Detroit, Michigan.
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Quentin Andre
INSEAD
Quentin graduated from HEC Paris with a master’s
degree in Economics, and is now a third Year PhD
Candidate at INSEAD, France. Passionate about
consumer financial decision making, he uses
insights from psychology, sociology, and economics
to investigate consumers’ complex relationships
with their money, from the moment it is earned to
the moment it is spent.
Lisa Beeler
University of Tennessee
Lisa Beeler is a 3rd year doctoral candidate. Her
research leverages mixed method approaches that
most appropriately investigate strategic marketing
in three substantive areas, personal selling/sales
management, cross-functional integration and
business-to-business relationships. Currently,
her dissertation research focuses on converting
friendships into business relationships and how brand attachment can be
detrimental when selling to friends. She is exploring this phenomenon by
using grounded-theory, multi-level matched dyadic data (salesperson and
customer), and experiments. Lisa has four years of experience working as
a National Marketing and Sales Director for a multi-million dollar businessto-business services firm and three years experience as a marketing
coordinator for a business-to-business goods firm. Her teaching
experience includes five semesters as an instructor in consumer behavior
and strategic integration of marketing and supply chain management and
she has guest lectured for numerous graduate level courses.
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Christopher Berry
University of Arkansas
Chris Berry is a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Marketing at the Sam M. Walton
College of Business. Given his research interest
in consumer health and welfare issues, his current
research primarily examines consumers’ response
to food labeling and health disclosures in both retail
and advertising contexts. Chris has published in
the Journal of Retailing and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing and
has presented his work at the Marketing Educators’ Conference, the
Marketing and Public Policy Conference, the Association for Consumer
Research Conference, the Society for Marketing Advances Conference,
the Southeast Marketing Symposium, and the Robert Mittelstaedt
Doctoral Symposium. In 2015, Chris was awarded the Brenda Derby
Memorial Award and was runner-up for the William O. Bearden Doctoral
Student Research Award.
James Blair
University of Rhode Island
A third-year marketing PhD student at the
University of Rhode Island, James is a consumer
behavior researcher with interests in price framing,
psychological ownership, global marketing,
and the sport industry. Currently, he has two
projects examining psychological ownership for
public spaces and optional surcharges being an
effective pricing strategy for firms. He has presented research at several
conferences including The Association of Marketing Theory and Practice
Conference, University of Rhode Island Graduate Conference, and CIBER
Faculty Development in International Business: Globalization Workshops.
James has taught courses at Boston College, Boston University, and the
University Rhode Island including introduction to business, marketing
principles, marketing research, and global marketing. His courses focus
on mixing theory with practice by incorporating experiential learning
through live-client projects which has gotten the attention of local media
outlets. He is actively involved in several organizations on-campus
including being a Senator for the Graduate Student Association,
Treasurer for Graduate Assistants United, and Graduate Student
Representative for the Athletics Advisory Board. Additionally he has
served as a Moderator for the University of Rhode Island College of
Business Administration Alumni Day, Scribe for the Marketing Science
Institute Trustees Meeting, and Session Chair for the Academy of
Marketing Science Conference.
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Kristina Brecko
Stanford University
I am a fourth year doctoral student in Marketing
at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. My
research interests include product pricing and
advertising strategy. In one current project, I work
to understand the limits of price discrimination in
durable good markets with evolving product quality
and costly legacy versions. In another stream of
research, together with Wesley Hartmann and partnering water agencies,
I am working to understand how advertising and durable water-efficient
technology can be used to shift perceptions of water scarcity and change
short and long-term water usage behaviors. Prior to entering the PhD
program, I studied Economics and French Cultural Studies at Cornell
University, and worked in data analytics consulting at Opera Solutions in
New York City. In my free time, I enjoy taking ballet classes and spending
time outdoors.
Mirja Bues
University of Muenster
Mirja Bues studied Business Administration at the
ESCP Europe Business School in France, UK and
Germany. She graduated with a Master degree in
September 2014 having focused on marketing
and finance. During her studies she worked as an
intern in the consultancy and retail industry. Since
September 2014, Mirja is a Ph.D. student at the
Marketing Center of the University of Muenster under the supervision of
Dr. Manfred Krafft. Her work focuses on consumer privacy in data-driven
environments, with a particular interest in paradoxical behaviors and in
public policy related implications.
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Federico (Rico) Bumbaca
University of California, Irvine
Rico Bumbaca is a fourth year Ph.D. student at
The Paul Merage School of Business, University
of California, Irvine. His research interest is in
consumer choice in the context of a big data
environment. Rico focuses on the development of
scalable estimation methodologies and high-fidelity
choice models that permit deeper and more precise
behavioral insights, and greater predictive accuracy. In particular, Rico
develops distributed Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for estimating
semi- and non-parametric Bayesian hierarchical choice models to address
substantive marketing research questions.
Rico is currently working with three big datasets. The first
models the nuances among recency, frequency, and monetary value
(RFM) to more deeply understand a donor’s probability of response to a
solicitation from a charitable organization. The second model quantifies
the impact of a loyalty program on visit frequency, spending, and store
profit while allowing for complex interactions among prior usage, tenure,
and promotions. The third models a consumer’s intertemporal choices to
understand how the redemption of points in a credit card reward program
influences future consumption. Rico completed his M.S. in operations
research at Virginia Tech, an MBA at MIT (Sloan), and M.S. and B.S. in
electrical engineering at the University of Toronto.
Kevin Chase
University of Kentucky
Kevin Chase is a Ph.D. candidate in the Gatton
College of Business and Economics at the
University of Kentucky. Prior to entering the
doctoral program at Kentucky, Kevin worked for
seven years as a sales rep and product marketing
manager in the financial services industry. Based
on this experience, Kevin’s primary research
interests are in the areas of sales, sales management, and organizational
buying behavior. For example, he is presently examining how different
configurations of buyers and sellers during a sales encounter affect
customer perceptions. His dissertation examines longitudinal decision
making within buying teams of a large public organization. He has
presented his research at the biannual Salesforce Productivity
Conference and Winter AMA. Kevin currently holds a BA in Finance from
Linfield College, and MBA with a concentration in marketing from the
University of Portland.
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Aray Chen
University of Georgia
Aray Chen is a third-year PhD candidate at the Terry
College of Business, University of Georgia. Aray’s
research focuses on cognitive advantages of limited
short-term memory capacity, evolutionary cognition,
signal structure of consumption and conceptual
metaphor in decision making. Aray is also teaching
undergraduate courses in marketing at University
of Georgia. Prior to joining the PhD program, Aray worked as marketing
communications specialist at Caterpillar and public relations account
manager for Volvo Cars, Siemens etc. Aray received her master’s degree
in Psychology from Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
and had a bachelor’s degree in English Literature.
Chaoqun Chen
Northwestern University
Chaoqun Chen is a doctoral student in Marketing
at Northwestern University, Kellogg School of
Management. Her research interests include
retailing, channel management, and new product
development.
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Jialie Chen
Cornell University
Jialie Chen is a third-year PhD student in Marketing
at Cornell University. His interests include
learning and information searching, dynamic
pricing. His current research projects focus on
consumers’ process of information search before
final conversions. Results from these projects,
constructed under various empirical settings,
also reveal the attribution problem in sponsored advertising and omnichannel retailing. To address his research questions, he applies structural
modelling approach, mainly single agent dynamic models and dynamic
games, to large-scale secondary data. His teaching interest includes
marketing management and digital marketing, which he has taught at
undergraduate level. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he received a
master degree in applied statistics and a Bachelor degree in economics.
Hyewon Cho
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Hyewon Cho is a fourth-year doctoral student in
Marketing at UIUC, where she studies consumer
behavior with the aim of understanding and
improving consumer welfare. She focuses primarily
on how cross-cultural factors shape prosocial
emotions and behaviors. Her other research projects
are also centered around consumer wellbeing:
how to improve consumer self-regulation and how to increase consumer
satisfaction with a product through a new technology (i.e., 3D printing).
Prior to joining the PhD program, she received her B.A. at Sogang
University and M.A. at New York University, both in psychology.
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Alex Cohen
Drexel University
Prior to beginning his doctoral program, Alex worked
for fifteen years in the hospitality business holding
positions as director of sales, general manager,
and senior vice president at companies including
Mirage Incorporated, Wyndham Hotels, Ocean
Properties, and Madison Parke. The deterioration of
his vision made it difficult to maintain his operational
roles, and he decided to pursue his second career as an academician
by first attaining a Master’s in hospitality management from Drexel
University. The experience of losing his vision has driven his research
focus with the goal of creating a more inclusive marketplace for the
underserved disabled market segment. His dissertation work examines
how accessibility-related service failures lead to avoidance behaviors
from not only directly affected disabled consumers, but also non-disabled
people in their social networks. Even with this ambitious research
agenda, he commits a great deal of his time and takes pride in his role
as a teacher where his learner-centered approach, along with a dynamic
and enthusiastic style, regularly earn him high praise from students and
colleagues. Alex lives in downtown Philadelphia with his wife and two
young sons, and enjoys running marathons, playing guitar, and helping in
fundraising efforts for the Foundation Fighting Blindness.
Joshua Coleman
University of Memphis
Joshua Coleman is a PhD Candidate at the
University of Memphis, where he will soon be
entering his final year. He received his BS in
marketing and MBA from Western Kentucky
University. Josh’s research interests include causerelated marketing, corporate social responsibility,
and social enterprises, and his dissertation involves
the application of physiological measurement to self-conscious emotions
and regulatory focus theory in the pursuit of effective cause-marketing
communication. Josh lives in Nashville, TN with his wife, Jill, and their twomonth old baby girl.
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Alexander Davidson
Concordia University
I am a PhD candidate in marketing at the John
Molson School of Business in Concordia University,
Montreal, Canada. I am currently researching
the influence of consumers’ materialistic values
on participation in non-ownership forms of
consumption. Specifically, I am interested in
determining if consumers with strong materialistic
values reveal a decline in positive emotions after (as compared to before)
an experience. Although research has shown that high materialism
individuals anticipate product purchases with positive emotions but
then reveal hedonic decline following consumption, I am investigating
whether the same pattern occurs in the context of experiences. I am
precisely focusing on experiential purchases as well as participation
towards different forms of collaborative consumption such as Airbnb,
Zipcar and neighborhood sharing programs. Aside from my research, I
have taught an introductory marketing course at the graduate level and a
business statistics course at the undergraduate level. I will be applying for
assistant professor positions at various universities this summer.
Ping Dong
University of Toronto
Ping Dong is a fourth year Ph.D. Candidate in
Marketing at the Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto. Her research focuses on
understanding the social influences on consumer
behavior. She is particularly interested in uncovering
factors and mechanisms that affect consumers’
decision to conform to others’ preferences (as
opposed to seeking uniqueness). Her research has been published in
leading marketing and psychology journals including the Journal of
Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Psychological Science, and Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, and has been featured in popular media outlets such as the
Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and Globe and Mail. In
her dissertation research, she studies the effects of moral violations on
consumers’ subsequent conformity tendency in consumption using both
lab experiments and archival data analysis. Her dissertation proposal was
recently selected as a co-winner of the 2015 ACR-Sheth Foundation
Dissertation Proposal Award.
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Christilene du Plessis
Erasmus University
Christilene is a PhD Candidate in Marketing at
the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus
University. Her research focuses on how consumers
form product and brand attitudes in an increasingly
technologically centered and interconnected world.
A first body of work aims to uncover how cognitive
processes – attention and inhibition – are influenced
by consumers’ increasing tendency to multitask while consuming media.
A second body of work focuses on how paying consumer reviewers to
write online product reviews influences the way in which attitudes are
expressed in the review, and how review readers process the review and
form product attitudes based on it.
Christian A. Eichert
City University London
Christian A. Eichert is a PhD Candidate in Marketing
at Cass Business School, City University London,
where he is working with Marius Luedicke and
Fleura Bardhi in Consumer Culture Theory. In his
dissertation research, Christian studies the role of
consumption for stigmatized consumers’ collective
identity work, as over time these consumers
become more widely accepted into mainstream culture. His research is
informed by theory from Sociology, Social Psychology, and Anthropology,
and is empirically grounded in the Post-WWII LGBT civil rights movement
in Germany. Christian holds a BA in Business Economics and an MA in
Management from Witten/Herdecke University, Germany, an MSc in
Social and Cultural Psychology from the London School of Economics,
and an MRes in Marketing from Cass Business School. Prior to joining
academia, Christian has collected more than 10 years of industry
experience as a founder, partner, and manager of various online- and
tech-ventures in Europe and the United States.
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René Eppmann
University of Cologne
René Eppmann is a doctoral student in the
Department of Marketing and Brand Management
at the University of Cologne under the supervision
of Prof. Dr. Franziska Völckner. His current research
activities mainly focus on gamification and the
reinforcement of consumer behavior. His projects on
gamification are threefold: In a conceptual article,
René and his co-authors define gamification from a marketing perspective
and propose directions for future research. An empirical project looks
at both positive and negative effects of gamification. Another paper
develops a scale to measure the experience consumers have when using
gamification applications. His second research interest is in studying the
behavioral consequences of reinforcement schedules based on operant
conditioning theory. Using behavioral experiments, he and his co-authors
investigate whether consumers behave differently given varying incentive
schemes. René earned a master’s degree in business administration –
majoring in marketing – from University of Cologne.
Larisa Ertekin
Texas A&M University
Larisa Ertekin is a third-year doctoral student
in Marketing at Texas A&M University. She
holds an MBA degree from Sabanci University,
Turkey and MS degree in Marketing from Texas
A&M University. Her research interests lie in the
area of brand management, product innovation
and interface between marketing and law. Her
dissertation examines the effect of different branding decisions on
firm value and firm performance. In her first essay, Larisa analyzes
firms’ decision to launch a new brand, extend an existing brand, or
create a sub-brand when introducing new products. She proposes a
theoretical framework that organizes the determinants of this decision
and empirically tests it on a large sample of new product introductions
in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. She also examines
financial implications of the new product branding decision. In her second
essay, Larisa examines threats that brands face in the marketplace and
analyzes the financial consequences of firms’ decision to protect their
brands in legal courts. She proposes a taxonomy of unauthorized uses of
trademarks and leverages an event study of trademark lawsuit filings to
examine the short and long term consequences of defending the brands
from marketplace attacks.
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Cong Feng
Syracuse University
Cong Feng is a doctoral candidate in marketing at
the Whitman School of Management, Syracuse
University. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics
from Lehigh University and a Bachelor of Economics
degree in Finance and Banking from Shenzhen
University. His current research focuses on the
interface of marketing and information economics,
innovation, and selling and sales management. His work has been
published, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing
Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales
Management, and Service Science. One of his papers was among the
finalists for the 2015 INFORMS Service Science Section Best Student
Paper Award.
Liz Friedman
Yale University
Liz Friedman is a third year doctoral student in the
Yale behavioral marketing department. Her research
focuses on the comparisons consumers make when
evaluating prices and making purchase decisions,
and how these considerations drive willingness to
buy, affordability judgments and perceptions of
fairness. Prior to attending Yale, Liz worked as a
management consultant first at the New England Consulting Group and
later at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte). She received her B.A. in
Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania
in 2010.
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Ashish S. Galande
Indian School of Business
Ashish S. Galande is a doctoral candidate at
the Indian School of Business in the Marketing
Department. He has over 10 years of experience in
marketing, new business development, and general
management across different sectors including hitech products, consumer durables, pharmaceuticals,
financial services, and mobile and electronic
payment services. Ashish has done his MBA at the Rutgers Business
School where he was involved with a clean energy start-up and helped
them raise over $1.5 million in funding from various grants and angel
investors. He has also been a visiting scholar at INSEAD for six months.
Ashish’s current research focuses on measuring the “chatter” from
unstructured data to better understand its implications for consumers,
firms and regulators. The term “chatter” is defined broadly to include all
types of discussion captured in unstructured format- consumer opinions
as captured in consumer reviews and blogs, intra firm discussions and,
public communications by firms and regulatory institutions. Using a
combination of econometric methods and natural language technologies,
I examine the influences on and of “chatter”.
Gabriel Gazzoli
Oklahoma State University
Gabriel Gazzoli’s research and teaching interest
in customer-employee interactions came about
naturally after working in hotels and restaurants for
more than a decade. His current research explores
the bright and dark side of prosocial motives
and behaviors. Gabriel teaches the introduction
to marketing course at OSU. Prior to joining the
doctoral program, he also taught restaurant management, rooms division
management, services marketing/management and hospitality marketing
at OSU’s School of Hospitality Management and at a private college in
Switzerland. Gabriel has lived in 9 different countries located in North and
South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. He holds a B.A degree in
hospitality and business from Washington State University and a M.S. in
hospitality management from Oklahoma State University.
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Fateme Ghadami
HEC Montreal
Fateme Ghadami is a PhD candidate in Marketing
and research assistant at HEC Montreal. In her
dissertation, she is working on consumer revenge
using different approaches (e.g., Scenario-based
experiment, field studies, and lab-experiment
employing physiological measures). The focus of
her dissertation is studying the effect of different
revenge behaviors on consumers’ well-beings. Through different methods,
she examines how direct versus indirect revenge behaviors would affect
consumers’ future desire for revenge. Moreover, she also studies the
effect of justice restoration and negative affect in this process. Fateme’s
work has been presented at ACR, and SCP. She has also won Quebec
Fonds Société et Culture (FQRSC) in 2015 to complete her dissertation.
Prior to her PhD, Fateme graduated from K.N. Toosi university of
Technology, Tehran, Iran in Information Technology (IT). She is passionate
about teaching and is interested in painting.
Manpreet Gill
Pennsylvania State University
Manpreet Gill is a 4th year PhD candidate in
Marketing in Smeal College of Business at the
Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses
on empirically determining causal effects of firms’
marketing interventions using observational and
quasi-experimental data. In one of his recent
works, he assessed the causal effect of B2B
mobile apps on firm performance. In another paper, on alumni donations,
Manpreet identifies the mechanisms generating social multiplier of
marketing among alumni donors and the magnitude of social multiplier
associated with these mechanisms. Before joining the PhD program at the
Pennsylvania State University, Manpreet earned Bachelors of Technology
in Electronics and Communications and MBA in marketing (with minor
economics). In addition, he worked in Indian academia for several years
and was actively involved in teaching (undergrad and grad business
students) and conducting academic research in the domain of marketing.
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Jamie Grigsby
Kent State University
Jamie is a doctoral candidate in marketing at
Kent State University. Her broad research interests
include impulsive buying behavior, consumer
decision making, self-concepts and identity, and
memory. Jamie’s dissertation explores the effects
of stories on persuasion. She examines how images
in advertising can tell stories, the impact of story
ads in a native advertising context, and how stories affect decisionmaking. She is also currently serving as Vice Chair of Research for
DocSIG, the American Marketing Association’s special interest group for
doctoral students. In this role she has had the opportunity to coordinate
the annual Who Went Where survey and report. Prior to joining the PhD
program, Jamie earned her MBA at Kent State University and BS at
Purdue University.
Kris Lindsey Hall
University of Alabama
Kris Lindsey Hall (BBA, St. Mary’s University, TX; MS
Marketing, University of Alabama) has just completed
her third-year in the PhD program in the Department
of Marketing at The University of Alabama. Prior
to Alabama, Kris gained professional experience in
marketing and branding in the hospitality and financial
services industries.
Kris’ research interests relate broadly to services marketing, particularly
the management of service failure and recovery. Her dissertation titled “An
Investigation of Consumer Expectations, Failure Attributions, and Desired
Recovery in a Collaborative Consumption Context” will develop a framework for
understanding Collaborative Consumption (CC) as well as empirically investigate
failure/recovery in a “triadic” CC context. Kris is scheduled to defend her proposal
in mid-July prior to interviewing at Summer AMA in Atlanta.
Kris’ research has been published in The Journal of Marketing Theory
and Practice, The Journal of Internet Commerce, and The Journal of Medical
Marketing. She currently has papers under review at The Journal of Applied
Psychology and International Business Review with others being prepared
for submission. Kris has received three grants and a fellowship to pursue her
research, which has been presented at international, national, and regional
conferences. More information: www.krislindseyhall.com
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Yoonju Han
Indiana University
Yoonju is a PhD candidate at Indiana University’s
Kelley School of Business. Her research interests
include consumers’ in-store decision making,
product displays, sales promotion using consumer
purchase history and eye and video-tracking data.
Her dissertation empirically investigates dynamics
of consumers’ in-store shopping behavior. In her first
essay, she focuses on six types of in-store displays and builds a hidden
Markov model to capture the consumer-retailer relationship states and
extends it to account for the existence of multiple information states in
a Bayesian framework. Her second essay investigates the dynamics of
multiple latent goal states of consumers during the checkout process
and the state-dependent shoppers’ behavior such as eye fixation and
purchase incidences at the checkout counter. She has a forthcoming
article in Marketing Letters and some of her work has been presented at
conferences like Marketing Science, Haring Symposium and U.T. Dallas
FORMS. At the Kelley School she has taught the undergraduate Marketing
Research class. Prior to joining the Ph.D program, she received her BBA
and MS in Marketing from Korea University and worked in marketing
division of Hyundai Motor Company.
Ceren Hayran
Koc University
Ceren Hayran is a fourth-year doctoral candidate
in marketing at the Graduate School of Business,
Koc University, Turkey. She received her
undergraduate degree from Bogazici University,
Turkey, and her master’s degree in business
administration from IAE Aix en Provence, France.
Before joining the PhD program, she worked as a
brand manager in a number of telecommunications and FMCG companies
including PepsiCo, which inspired her to pursue an academic career in
marketing. Ceren’s research interests lie in the area of consumer behavior
with a particular focus on branding and consumer well-being. She has coauthored an article on cobranding published in the Journal of Consumer
Research and has a forthcoming book chapter on brand extensions in “The
Routledge Companion to Brand Management”. In her dissertation, she is
exploring the recently emerging construct of FOMO (feeling of missing
out) and its relationship with consumer behavior. With her work on FOMO,
she was selected the co-winner of ACR-Sheth dissertation proposal
award in 2015. Her biggest passion outside of academics is traveling.
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Li Huang
University of South Carolina
Li Huang is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of
Marketing at the Darla Moore School of Business,
University of South Carolina. Her research examines
how various social relationships (interpersonal
relationships, group relationships, consumer-brand
relationships) influence consumer memories and
decisions. Her dissertation which investigates the
effects of social sharing on consumer memories has been awarded the
University of South Carolina’s SPARC grant and the Darla Moore School
of Business internal research grant. Her research has been published in
the Journal of Consumer Research and International Journal of Research
in Marketing. She has taught undergraduate courses at City University of
Hong Kong and University of South Carolina (where she was nominated
for the Excellence in Teaching Award). These accomplishments have
earned her recognition as a 2016 Breakthrough Graduate Scholar at the
University of South Carolina.
Mariam Humayun
York University
Mariam Humayun is a third year doctoral candidate
at Schulich School of Business at York University.
In 2012, she finished her Master’s degree in
Strategic Marketing from Durham University
with the highest honours of Distinction and was
awarded the Best Dissertation Prize for her thesis.
Her research interests focus on the intersection of
technology, branding and consumer culture. For her dissertation, she is
studying how decentralized brands emerge, survive and become resilient
over the internet’s ecosystem. In particular, her research examines how
consumers of crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin, form decentralized
brand communities and use social media as a modern myth-making
machine. Prior to joining Schulich, she has worked at Unilever and
Synergy Advertising and has a strong interest in photography.
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Omar Itani
University of Texas Arlington
Omar Itani is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in
Marketing at the University of Texas Arlington.
As a doctoral student, his primary research interests
include personal selling, sales management, and
marketing strategy. Recently, Omar received the
2016 Distinguished Doctoral Student Award from
the Marketing Department at the University of
Texas Arlington. In his dissertation, Omar tries to provide some answers
to the ever evoking question “Who Am I?”. In three essays he examines,
from different perspectives, the role of identification at customer’s and
salesperson’s levels. His work has been accepted at various conferences,
both nationally and internationally, including Summer American Marketing
Association, National Conference of Sales Management, Marketing
Management Association, Global Sales Science Institute. Omar has
different manuscripts under advanced review at multiple peer reviewed
journals including Journal of Personnel Selling and Sales Management,
Industrial Marketing Management and International Journal of Research
in Marketing. Omar is the recipient of both the University of Texas
Arlington Business Ethics Program Research Grant and Direct Selling
Education Foundation Fellowship.
Gaurav Jain
University of Iowa
Gaurav is a fourth year PhD candidate at the
department of Marketing at University of Iowa.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering
and an MBA in Marketing before joining the PhD
program. Gaurav’s research examines judgments
in the absence of complete information. More
specifically, his research spans the fields of
numerical cognition and judgment, and implications for marketing,
working memory capacity, and attention. His dissertation looks at how
individuals ‘search’ for a response in a search space. In addition to the
domain of numbers, he examines search across domains of haptics,
sounds and grey scales. One of the key findings of the research is the
presence of numerical landmarks on the mental number line and their
influence on numerical judgments. He has multiple projects at various
stages, including work examining anchoring, numerosity biases, attribute
framing, incompleteness bias etc. When time permits, Gaurav loves to
drive and travel to various places – he has driven more than hundred
thousand miles in the last four years while travelling to more than twenty
states in the US.
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Omid Kamran-Disfani
University of Missouri-Columbia.
Omid Kamran-Disfani is a Doctoral Candidate in
Marketing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
He has earned his Masters degree in Marketing
from the University of Leeds in England and his
BSc degree in Industrial Engineering from Tehran
Polytechnic University (Iran). His research revolves
around Customer Analytics and Retailing. He is
working on a few projects including one with WCAI (Wharton Customer
Analytics Initiative), and another project on Category Management in
Retailing. He has submitted two papers to JBR, one of which is invited
for revise and resubmit. He has also taught Marketing Research
undergraduate course ( as the primary instructor) at the University of
Missouri for which he received the “Outstanding Teaching Assistant
Award”. For summer of 2016 he has developed and teaches a
Hybrid undergraduate course. He enjoys traveling with his wife Amy,
watching major soccer tournaments (WorldCup and UEFA Euro) and
International food.
In Hye Kang
University of Maryland
In Hye Kang is a third-year PhD student in Marketing
at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses
on understanding consumer morality. In her two
research projects with her advisor Professor
Amna Kirmani, she examines antecedents and
downstream consequences of dishonest consumer
behavior (e.g., lying to a company to get a refund).
Specifically, she examines how activation of abstract vs. concrete
construal influences dishonest consumer behavior. She also examines
whether consumers’ dishonest (vs. honest) behavior toward a company
has consequences for their future behavior toward the company. Other
than consumer morality, In Hye is also interested in understanding auction
behaviors. In her project with Professor Eric Greenleaf, she examines
how earning consumer surplus in an online auction affects future
consumer behavior such as willingness to pay and likelihood of winning.
In Hye is a doctoral fellow at the 2016 Haring Symposium. She was
awarded the Qualtrics Behavioral Research Grant in 2015 and the Best
Teaching Assistant Award in 2013. Before entering the PhD program,
In Hye worked as a market researcher at Gallup Korea. She received
her master’s degree in psychology from New York University, and her
bachelor’s degree in consumer studies from Seoul National University.
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Pinar Kekec
Michigan State University
I am a doctoral candidate at Michigan State
University, finishing up my third year. My current
focus is to go to job market this upcoming summer
AMA. My research focus is on legitimacy and
marketing strategy. During the second year of the
doctoral program, I was lucky to be involved in a
project that is published in Journal of Retailing.
Currently, I am working on separate projects about exporting, knowledge
elements, and contract violations. Aside from my PhD endeavors, I
was born and raised in Turkey. Later on, I went to Ontario, Canada to
learn English as well as to complete my undergraduate degree with a
Concentration in Marketing. I continued my education with a Master
of Science in Management (Marketing) degree. I wanted to use the
experience I gained with an MSc degree to have an easier transition to
the doctoral program. I wrote a thesis on product positioning in wine
context, which also marginally touched upon buyer behavior themes. The
thesis built upon was Jagdish Sheth’s (1991) paper “Why we buy what we
buy” framework.
Mansur Khamitov
Western University
Mansur Khamitov is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing
at the Ivey Business School, Western University. His
primary research stream focuses on branding. More
specifically, he studies the role of interpersonal
influences on consumer-brand relationships as
well as brand and consumer transgressions.
His secondary research stream focuses on the
psychology of money and consumer financial decision-making. Mansur’s
dissertation aims to establish a systematic understanding of research on
brand loyalty by investigating its antecedents and their relative predictive
power over time, thus shedding light on important differences/similarities
among various brand relationship strength metrics and their longitudinal
downstream consequences on brand loyalty. To that end, he employs a
combination of meta-analytical, experimental and survey methodologies
in his dissertation work. Mansur has two forthcoming articles at Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology and Cognition. Prior to starting his
Ph.D., he spent 3 years working in fast-moving consumer goods and the
pharmaceutical industry. His industry experience is mostly in branding
and marketing management, including work as a senior product manager
at Polpharma and a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, where he
managed such brands as Oral-B, Blend-A-Med (Crest), Camay, and
Safeguard. Mansur also has experience teaching Integrated Marketing
Communications at the University of Western Ontario.
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Salil Khetani
University of Utah
Salil Khetani is a doctoral student in Marketing,
at David Eccles School of Business, University of
Utah. His research interests are product innovation,
service marketing, and relationship marketing. His
current research is on the commercial success of
user generated innovations. He is in his third year,
and his advisors are Professor Arul Mishra and
Professor Himanshu Mishra. He has taught an undergraduate course
called Principles of Marketing for one semester. Salil Khetani has an MBA
in Marketing from Mumbai University and seven years of sales/marketing
work experience in varied industries such as financial services, elevators,
and construction steel.
Eunsoo Kim
University of Michigan
Eunsoo Kim is a marketing doctoral candidate at
the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University
of Michigan. Her overarching research interest
is quantitative modeling of social interaction in
marketing contexts using multi-methods of data
collection. For her dissertation, she leverages
a novel dataset provided by a large multilevel
marketing firm to examine how a distributor’s network grows through
the interaction with down-line collaborators using a Bayesian two-sided
matching model. Her second stream of research looks at how shared
consumption affects moment-to-moment experiential consumption
(e.g., sports watching), utilizing a field survey and a physiological
experiment with hierarchical Bayes modeling. Eunsoo holds an MA in
Management Engineering from KAIST. She received her BA in Business
Administration from Sogang University in Seoul, Korea.
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Junghyun Kim
Virginia Tech
Junghyun Kim is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in
marketing at Virginia Tech. His research interests
primarily center on improving consumer well-being,
both psychologically and physically. In particular,
he is interested in how consumers deal with
negative emotions through consumption behavior.
His dissertation explores the impact of loneliness
on consumer behaviors by focusing on consumer coping strategies. His
work also has examined a role of contextual factors in consumer calorie
estimation biases and its impact on food choice. His working papers have
been presented at the Association for Consumer Research, the Society
for Consumer Psychology, and the Association for Psychological Science.
Before joining the PhD program at Virginia Tech, he received his master’s
degree in marketing from Georgia State University, an MSBA from Yonsei
University, Korea, and bachelor’s degree in business administration from
Korea University.
Soyoung Kim
University of Alberta
Soyoung Kim is a third year doctoral student in
Marketing the University of Alberta. Soyoung’s
primary research interests lie in social adversity,
consumer-brand relationships as coping behaviors,
word-of-mouth, and self-control and consumption.
In her research, she focuses on understanding the
processes and consequences of consumers’ use of
brands as a means to cope with social adversity. She is also interested in
examining the underlying physiological processes of consumers’ selfcontrol and consumption as well as consumers’ product perceptions and
judgments influenced by linguistic styles used in online word-of-mouth.
Her work has been presented at the Association for Consumer Research
and the Society for Consumer Psychology.
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Tami Kim
Harvard University
Tami is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business
School. Tami’s research focuses on the notion of
implicit contracts—that is, a set of practices that
individuals expect others to follow in the absence
of explicit promises—focusing on a) how such
contracts develop (often quickly and unexpectedly)
and b) how violations of such contracts manifest.
She graduated from Harvard College with an A.B in Government, and has
work experiences in consulting and political campaigns.
Kuan-Chou Ko
University of Illinois at Chicago
Kuan-Chou Ko (Jason) is a 4th year PhD student in
Marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago
(UIC). He received his BA degree in Business
Administration and MBA degree from National
Taiwan University (NTU). He came to UIC in 2012
with research experience gained at NTU and the
Taiwan National Science Council and professional
experience in the finance field. His major research interest is consumer
decision and consumption in competitive contexts. In his dissertation,
he conceptually and empirically disentangles the rank and status effects
that have been confounded in extant literature. He further uncovers the
moderating role of rank trajectory in individual innovation adoption and
a non-monotonic effect of rank on organizational innovation adoption.
In addition to the dissertation, he is also actively building his research
portfolio around the topic of consumer decision in a competitive context
more widely by investigating the concept of gamification (with Prof.
Alan Malter) and examining the optimal design of innovation contests
(with Prof. Sajna Ibrahim).
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Melika Kordrostami
Iowa State University
Melika is a PhD candidate at Iowa State University.
She has done her MBA and bachelor’s degree
(Industrial Engineering) both in Sharif University of
technology in Tehran, Iran. Her research interests
are advertising, impact of incongruent information on
consumers, and brand relationships. Her dissertation
consists of two essays concerning female power
portrayals in advertisements. She incorporates both qualitative and
quantitative research methods in her dissertation. She has taught
“Marketing Principles” and “Consumer Behavior” at Iowa State University,
and based on course evaluations, both of them were well-received by
students. Her main teaching interests are Consumer Behavior, Advertising,
and Social Media. She has worked for several years in multinational and
local companies such as Nestle and Siemens in Iran before joining the
PhD program.
Alena Kostyk
New Mexico State University
Ms. Alena Kostyk holds an M.B.A. degree from
Michigan State University. Currently she is a
doctoral candidate in marketing at New Mexico
State University. Her research interests include
consumer decision making and survey methodology.
When she is not busy doing research or teaching,
she likes to hike with her Welsh Corgi.
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Aleksandra Kovacheva
University of Pittsburgh
Aleksandra Kovacheva is a fourth year doctoral
student in Marketing at Katz Graduate School of
Business, University of Pittsburgh. Aleksandra
uses field studies, lab experiments, and company
data to study consumer behavior. One stream of
her research focuses on understanding consumers’
preferences for and reactions to surprise and
uncertainty. In one of her projects, she explores consumers’ desires to
purchase surprise offerings (such as Birchbox) over certain alternatives.
A second stream of her research investigates the role of control and
effort in consumer experiences. For example, she looks at consumers who
assume the role of a host (vs. a guest) in social experiences and examines
how asymmetric investments of effort impact consumers’ enjoyment
of joint experiences. Aleksandra holds a Master’s degree in Business
Administration from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus
University, The Netherlands and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics
from Sofia University, Bulgaria. Prior to joining academia, Aleksandra
worked as a market analyst at Nielsen, a marketing manager of the
National Theater of Bulgaria, and a marketing associate in a publishing
company. Outside of academia, Aleksandra enjoys running, hiking, yoga,
performance and visual arts.
Matthew Lastner
Louisiana State University
Matt Lastner is a fourth year doctoral student in
the Department of Marketing at the E.J. Ourso
College of Business at Louisiana State University
(LSU). Originally from Frederick, Maryland, Matt
earned a B.S. in Marketing and Management
from James Madison University in 2005 and an
MBA from the University of Maryland in 2012.
His current research interests include sales and sales management,
relationship marketing, and the impact of disruptive events in buyerseller relationships. His research has been published in Journal of
Business Research and Journal for the Advancement of Marketing
Education. Additionally, Matt has presented at the annual conferences
for the American Marketing Association and the Academy of Marketing
Science, as well as at the National Conference for Sales Management.
Matt’s research has been recognized on several occasions, including
winning best paper awards at the Academy of Marketing Science
(2014), the Society for Marketing Advances (2014), and the Academy of
Management Meeting (2015). He is currently working on his dissertation
investigating the impact of disruptive events on buyer-seller relationships
in a B2B context. His teaching interests include professional selling,
sales management, and marketing strategy. Prior to academia, Matt
spent seven years working in industry as a sales professional and
operations manager.
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Hyeong-Tak Lee
University of North Carolina
Hyeong-Tak Lee is a doctoral candidate in Marketing
at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation
topic focuses on the extended warranty in the
durable goods market. In particular, the first project
empirically examines the effect of expiry of base
warranty on the purchase rate of extended warranty
for used automobiles. Based on the reduced-form yet casual findings in
the first paper, he develops a structural demand model to uncover the
demand primitives of extended warranty. Prior to joining the program, he
obtained a Master’s degree in Statistics from Ohio State University and
BS in Business Administration from Korea University.
Jennifer Lee
SUNY Binghamton
I am a marketing PhD candidate at State University
of New York at Binghamton. I had received a
bachelor’s degree from Yonsei University in Seoul,
Korea, and a master’s degree from Oregon State
University. In the earlier stage in the academia
during my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, my
major area was in fashion studies, especially in
retailing and channel relationships. Since I made an exciting shift into the
marketing discipline, I have been broadening the research area to interand intra-firm relationships and service markets. In particular, I study
distorted service markets in which customers are often hamstrung in
evaluating optimal quality levels. I enjoy taking inter- and multi-disciplinary
approaches especially among the fields of relationship marketing,
retailing, and organizational studies.
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Sarah Lefebvre
University of Central Florida
Sarah Lefebvre is a PhD candidate at the University
of Central Florida, concentrating in sensory aspects
of nutrition and wellness products. Specifically,
her dissertation focuses on the effect of scent on
food consumption behaviors and the relationship
between emerging food trends and hedonic
attributes of products. Prior to starting her PhD,
she earned a Masters of Medical Science in Human Nutrition from the
University of Sheffield where her thesis examined the influence of
nutrition and exercise intervention on the body composition of breast
cancer patients. Additionally, Sarah received her MBA from the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro and B.S. with Honors in Human Kinetics
from the University of Ottawa.
Yitian (Sky) Liang
University of British Columbia
Yitian (Sky) Liang is a fifth year PhD candidate in
the department of marketing at the University of
British Columbia and will be on the AMA job market
this summer. His main research focuses on pricing
strategies. In his job market paper, he studies the
design of pricing policy in C2C exchange platforms
- specifically the commonly used two-part tariff
pricing. He compares how the fixed and variable parts influence the market
volume, price level and dispersion, as well as the platform revenue. As an
extension, he also compares two different sales mechanisms, i.e., fixed
price posting and auction. In another project, he empirically studies the
long-puzzling problem of uniform pricing in the movie industry. In addition
to pricing strategies, his general interest also includes other issues in
industrial organization. In one project, he investigates the effect of a
large scale government subsidy program in an emerging market; and in
another one, he examines the profitability of O2O platforms in the group
buying industry.
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Jia Liu
Columbia University
Jia Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at Columbia
University. Her research falls into two major
streams. One stream focuses on consumer online
search. Although much research in information
retrieval has studied how to optimize search
engines given search queries, much less is known
on how consumers formulate their queries and how
queries reflect preferences. She tackles these research questions with
a mix of experiments, sophisticated statistical modeling, and machine
learning methods. A second stream of research examines how loyalty
programs and promotions influence consumers’ purchase behaviors.
Using customer purchase panel data from both the field and experiment,
she attempts to understand how firms can leverage loyalty programs and
promotions jointly to foster customer loyalty and increase revenue. Jia
received a B.S. in Mathematics from Tianjin University. She earned a M.S.
in Statistics from Michigan State University, and also a M.S. in Marketing
from Columbia University.
Shih-Hao Liu
Saint Louis University
Joining the PhD program in 2013, Shih-Hao (Steven)
Liu is a doctoral candidate in the department of
International Business and Marketing at Saint
Louis University. Steven earned his M.B.A. degree
from Thunderbird School of Global Management in
2009. For his undergraduate studies, he received
Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Finance in 2002
from National Taipei University, Taiwan. Prior to pursuing the PhD degree,
Steven had a career as a marketing specialist in several companies and
served as the head of marketing department of a Taiwanese electronics
manufacturer in 2011. During this period, Steven decided to change
his career path to academic research with the goal of advancing the
practical Intelligence through theoretical lenses. Steven has been active
in research and teaching. He has presented his original research at the
AOM, AIB southeast, AIB Midwest, and AIB west academic conferences.
During his time at Saint Louis University, Steven has taught marketing
management and is receiving the Certificate for University Teaching
skills from Center of Teaching Excellence. With research interests across
International Business and Marketing disciplines, Steven is currently
concentrating on exploring consumer cross-channel shopping behaviors.
His dissertation seeks to understand consumer purchase decision in the
context of omni-channel retailing.
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Zhuping Liu
University of Texas at Austin
Zhuping is a doctoral candidate in Quantitative
Marketing at The University of Texas at Austin.
He is interested in studying marketing issues
using Bayesian statistics and game theory. He has
applied spato-temporal models, dynamic linear
models and game theory models to his research on
mobile marketing, sports Marketing and targeted
Marketing. He is currently working with companies on research projects
on rural marketing in developing countries and on location- and behaviorbased mobile targeting in developed countries.
Andrew Long
University of Colorado
Andrew is a Ph.D. student in Marketing at the
Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado
Boulder. His research explores how cognitive
structures influence consumer decision making,
particularly in the areas of consumer financial
decision making, health and nutrition decisions, and
responses to product innovation and differentiation.
Andrew’s papers investigate how people view companies as safer
investments when they feel they understand what the company does,
how the various ways people can learn product categories influences
judgments about category members, and how consumers generate causal
models to explain product benefits. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., Andrew
worked as a lab manager at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management
and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Andrew
completed his undergraduate studies in Psychology at Vanguard
University of Southern California.
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Chongyu Lu
University of Houston
Chongyu is a doctoral candidate at Bauer College
of Business in University of Houston. She expects
to complete her Ph.D degree requirements by
May of 2017. Her background is in statistics and
economics. She is doing general empirical work.
Her research interests include internet marketing,
branding and advertising. Her expertise is internet
marketing. Most of her current research is about searcher’s click behavior
on search engine results page. She has taught an undergraduate course
in Internet Marketing. Also, she has been working with a local interactive
marketing agency to provide actionable insights for both the agency and
its clients.
Thai Hai Duong Mac
ESSEC Business School
Hai Duong T. Mac is a marketing PhD candidate at
ESSEC Business School. Before joining ESSEC,
he has five years’ experience in marketing
management roles from brand assistant to
marketing manager. His latest position was
the product marketing manager for Samsung
Electronics Company, in charge of washing machine
and refrigerator in Vietnamese market. His career in marketing has been
fostered thanks to a strong academic record. He achieved his first Master
as the valedictorian of the MSc in International Marketing program at
CERAM Business School, France. His second Master with distinction
is the prestigious MBA granted by CFVG Vietnam. Capable of utilizing
both modeling and consumer research techniques, he is able to apply
different research approaches and methodology, including Bayesian
statistics, structural equation modeling, network analysis, to study his
topics of interest. His focus is currently on consumers at the bottom of
the pyramid, morality in consumption and negative publicity.
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Zackary Mendenhall
McGill University
Zack Mendenhall is a doctoral candidate at the
Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill
University. Zack concentrates on consumer
behavior research, with an interest in charitable
behavior and physiological factors in consumption.
In the charitable behavior area, Zack has two
projects. In the first project, he examines the
effect of belief in free will on charitable behavior. In the second project,
Zack is looking at how reminders of previous contributions affect
subsequent charitable behavior. In the area of physiological influences on
consumption, Zack has co-authored three publications, including a recent
paper accepted at the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Matthew D. Meng
Boston University
Matthew D. Meng is a doctoral candidate at
Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
Prior to moving to Boston from Australia,
Matthew received a B.Sc. in Psychology from
the University of Melbourne and an M.Bus. in
Marketing with Distinction from RMIT University.
His previous experience working with not-for-profit
organizations steered his research interests towards social marketing
and sustainability. The objective of his research is to uncover novel and
practical ways to encourage prosocial consumerism, including topics
such as the impact of self-identity, social norms, and categorization on
recycling rates, as well as methods to increase organ donations, and the
impact of addiction messages on subsequent behavior. Along with other
collaborators, he has been published in both management and psychology
journals, and has had studies highlighted in media outlets such as The
Washington Post. One of Matthew’s projects with Remi Trudel and
Jennifer Argo received a Transformative Consumer Research Grant
from the Association of Consumer Research and the Sheth Foundation.
Matthew also serves as a lecturer at Boston University where he teaches
consumer behaviour to undergraduates and has developed an online sport
management course for advanced high school students.
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Yan Meng
Baruch College, CUNY
Yan is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at Baruch
College, the City University of New York. She
graduated from one of the top business schools in
Japan and published a book chapter in Japanese
regarding social sustainability. She earned her
MBA degree in the U.S. and studied in the master’s
program of statistics at the University of Toronto.
Yan also worked as a full-time employee in several industries including
in one of the world’s 500 fortune companies. The experience of living,
learning, and working in China, Japan, Canada, and the U.S. enriches
her life and benefits her teaching and research. Yan’s current research
areas involve looking at how linguistic and contextual cues and cultural
meanings and practices influence judgment and decision making. She
has published her findings in proceedings for marketing and psychology
conferences such as ACR, AMA, APA, and AMS and at peer reviewed
journals. One of her papers is under revision for a resubmission to Journal
of Marketing Research. Yan has been a reviewer for multiple conferences
and a trainee reviewer of Journal of Consumer Research under her
adviser Dr. Ana Valenzuela’s recommendation. Yan is also an officer of
the Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group of AMA, responsible for its
digital marketing.
Alex Mitchell
Queen’s University
Alex is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the
Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. His
research interests center on how the interactions
of consumers, marketers, and other stakeholders
shape the agreements, responsibilities, and social
elements that come to structure the marketplace.
Alex’s dissertation uses the emergent markets
for 3D printing and related technologies to examine the ways in which
technological change is driven by meaning making and interpretation
amongst marketers, and the impact of these processes on the
development of market structures and arrangements. Additional ongoing
research examines the evolution of social movements and their impact on
market structures through a longitudinal study of the fast food restaurant
chain McDonald’s. His past research has explored organizational
experiences of changing delivery models in healthcare, as well as
marketing strategy development in social enterprise settings. Prior to
his graduate studies, Alex spent over ten years in the computer software
industry in technical marketing and product development roles.
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Lisa Monahan
University of South Florida
Lisa Monahan is currently a PhD candidate at the
University of South Florida. She is originally from
New York City where she spent 12 years working in
advertising and brand management at a variety of
firms including J. Walter Thompson, Unilever, Hanes
Brands, and Citigroup. She holds an MBA from
Columbia University and BA from Amherst College.
Her research interests include branding and advertising.
Jihwan Moon
University of Florida
Jihwan Moon is a fourth year doctoral student in
Marketing at the University of Florida. His research
interests include the study of firms’ optimal decisions
involving pricing, product line, endogenous timing,
advertising, etc. Using both analytical models and
experiments, his job market paper establishes
an underlying mechanism to explain how firms’
pricing decisions can signal product types (broad-appeal vs. narrowappeal). In other projects, he focuses on optimal product-line bundling
under differentiation constraints, optimal timing of competitive pricing
given cost shocks, and optimal media advertising in a mixed duopoly
where profit-seeking and nonprofit organizations compete. His research
interests also include customer satisfaction. Employing the American
Customer Satisfaction Index and the Index of Consumer Expectations,
he analyzes the dynamic effect of consumers’ economic outlook on their
future satisfaction. Prior to entering the PhD, he studied Mathematics
and Business at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
His master thesis proves that the integration order is invariant to both
temporal aggregation and disaggregation while providing a generalized
framework to disaggregate lower-frequency time series and evaluate the
disaggregation performance. This paper is published in Journal of Business
& Economic Statistics.
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Carter Morgan
University of Miami
Carter Morgan is a second-year doctoral candidate
in the Marketing Department at the University of
Miami, where he studies consumer behavior. His
specific research interests include social influences
and social identity; perceived power and agency;
and aesthetic influences on consumption. In
particular, his research primarily focuses on two
areas. First, he examines how activated social identities influence the
extent to which consumers value agency in their choice and behavior.
For example, he investigates how activating different social identities
affects consumer preferences for more (vs. less) assertive identityrelevant marketing messages. Second, he examines how different logo
designs optimize consumer brand attitudes. For instance, he investigates
how image-based versus text-based logos interact with consumer brand
knowledge to influence consumer brand attachment. He has presented
his research at conferences for the Association for Consumer Research,
the Society for Judgement and Decision Making, and the Society for
Consumer Psychology.
Mehdi Nezami
HEC Paris
I’m a Ph.D. student in Marketing at HEC Paris,
and will join the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign as a post-doctoral research fellow
starting Fall 2016. My current research primarily
focuses on (1) Marketing Strategy, (2) MarketingFinance interface, and (3) B2B Marketing.
Particularly, my research examines the performance
effect of service transition strategies in industrial markets.
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Cameron “Duncan” Nicol
University of Mississippi
Cameron “Duncan” Nicol is a fourth-year doctoral
student in the Department of Marketing at the
University of Mississippi School of Business.
Prior to entering the doctoral program, Duncan
worked for 6 years as a sales representative and
consultant in the wireless telecommunications
industry. Duncan’s research focus is in strategic
marketing, top management teams and sales. His dissertation work
examines differences in the firms’ top management team members’
characteristics, personalities and traits as antecedents to strategic
marketing outcomes. Duncan has served as an ad hoc reviewer at AMA
conferences in the area of strategy and innovation. He has presented his
research at both the AMA summer and winter academic conferences. His
research investigating the role of marketing in the Target data crisis will
appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing
Science. Duncan’s teaching interests include marketing strategy, sales
and professional selling and marketing research.
Ga-Eun Oh
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ga-Eun (Grace) Oh is a fourth-year PhD candidate in
Marketing at HKUST. Her main research interests
concern how consumers’ internal motivations
interact with available external information to
influence food consumption decisions. In one
paper, she investigates whether nutrition labeling
does indeed have an effect on food consumption,
by proposing a novel perspective based on mental budgeting at the day
(as opposed to meal) level. In related work, she explores the interplay of
social influence with food labels. Grace is also interested in designing
interventions that promote healthy food consumption without taxing
consumers – in another paper she examines the effect of various choice
architectures in a large-scale field experiment. Prior to pursuing her PhD,
she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a Master’s
degree in Marketing, both from Seoul National University, Korea. She is
currently a visiting PhD student at Columbia University Graduate School
of Business.
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Nicholas Olson
University of Minnesota
Nicholas Olson is a PhD candidate who just
completed his fourth year at the University
of Minnesota. His work has been featured in
presentations at Association for Consumer
Research and Society for Consumer Psychology
conferences. His research deals broadly with
consumer identity, and more specifically with
the social implications stemming from various aspects of identity.
His dissertation examines how consumers with a maximizer identity,
who want to be perceived as individuals who attain only the best for
themselves, behave toward others. Two essays together explore the
potentially adverse effects of a maximizer identity on consumers’
interpersonal conduct, considering how they perceive others as well as
the word of mouth they choose to share with others.
Max Pachali
Goethe University
My name is Max Pachali and I am a PhD student
at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Professor
Thomas Otter is my supervisor and I am working
as a doctoral student at his chair of Services
Marketing in Frankfurt. I received a Bachelor
degree in Business Administration and Economics
from Goethe University prior to joining the PhD
program. My research focuses on Bayesian applications to problems in
marketing and I am mainly interested in applying statistical models to
improve marketing actions. My first project is a joint work with Peter Kurz
(TNS INFRATEST) and Professor Otter where we investigate the impact
of how to generalize from a hierarchical model on optimal marketing
actions. In this work, we compare the current industry practice of using
the collection of individual level point estimates (posterior means) to the
statistically more coherent approach of relying on the posterior predictive
density inferred from the first stage prior heterogeneity distribution
(hierarchical prior). We find that posterior means can lead to suboptimal
actions compared to the hierarchical prior if individual level information
is small. This observation amplifies in a framework where we use a lognormal prior for some coefficients to implement economically meaningful
a priori constraints.
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Anna Paley
New York University
Anna Paley is a 4th year doctoral student at
New York University. She is interested in the domain
of consumer experiences, and is primarily focused
on how consumers evaluate these experiences.
The first essay in her dissertation explores how
the enjoyment of positive hedonic stimuli changes
depending on the amount of prior information
available to consumers. In the absence of specific prior information, the
pleasure of finding out about the experience occurs during the experience
itself. This pleasure becomes conflated with experienced utility,
leading to increased enjoyment of the stimuli. The second essay in her
dissertation examines the effect of prior evaluation of hedonic stimuli on
the anticipation and enjoyment of that stimuli. When consumers engage in
prior evaluation of their experience (e.g. ranking a set of upcoming songs,
rating the extent to which they are looking forward to an upcoming video),
they are (i) less excited about their experience in advance, and (ii) enjoy the
experience less than consumers who do not engage in prior evaluation.
Her dissertation is advised by Tom Meyvis. In addition to her focus on
consumer experiences, Anna also explores topics related to consumer
welfare, including portion size choices and savings behavior.
Anita Pansari
Georgia State University
Anita Pansari is a doctoral student at the Center for
Excellence in Brand and Customer Management, J.
Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State
University. Her research interests are in empirical
marketing strategy where she solves relevant
business problems using econometric models.
Substantively, she seeks to understand and examine
the effect of buyer behavior and employee behavior on firm performance.
She has a forthcoming article in Journal of Marketing Research where
she along with her coauthor developed the engagement framework
which comprises of the effect of employee engagement on customer
engagement, and the effect of both customer and employee engagement
on firm performance. Currently, she explores the strategic orientation of
organizations to understand firm behavior and culture. She has published
in Sloan Management Review and Journal of International Marketing. She
was a doctoral fellow at the 1st AMS Doctoral Consortium in 2015. Anita
received her master’s and bachelor’s degree in Economics from India.
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Hannah Perfecto
University of California, Berkeley
Hannah is a fourth-year doctoral student in the
Haas School of Business at the University of
California, Berkeley, working with Leif Nelson and
Clayton Critcher. Broadly, she is interested in
judgment and decision making, consumer behavior,
and social psychology. Her current focus is on
metacognitive ease in decision making: how we
can make decisions feel easier or harder and what different downstream
consequences can be. Her dissertation research looks at how matching
a salient attribute of a decision’s frame with a salient attribute of
the options (e.g., choosing positive outcomes and rejecting negative
outcomes) make the decision feel easier than when there is a mismatch,
leading to, among other things, increased confidence in one’s response.
She also does work on replicability in social/consumer psychology. (Ask
her about pre-registration!) Hannah received her bachelor’s degree in
psychology from Yale University in 2012.
Constant Pieters
Tilburg University
Constant Pieters is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing
at Tilburg University, where he also received two
master’s degrees. His Ph.D. research is focused
on how firms can improve the measurement and
management of complex customer-to-customer
interactions. Of specific interest are the origins and
nature of these interactions, and how they result
in changes in customer value, or movements in the customer network. In
particular, Constant studies phenomena such as (online) social networks,
social contagion and word-of-mouth, and the marketing strategies that
affect these phenomena. In a first paper, featured in the MSI Working
Paper Series, he looks at whether customers who were exposed to wordof-mouth information are also more likely to talk more in turn. Constant
also has a methodological research agenda, which resulted in a paper on
the theory and empirics of (moderated) U-shapes, currently forthcoming in
the Strategic Management Journal. Constant co-teaches graduate-level
courses on Structural Equation Modeling and Customer Analytics.
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Ruth Pogacar
University of Cincinnati
Ruth Pogacar is a fourth year doctoral candidate at
the Lindner College of Business at the University
of Cincinnati. Her research interests include
marketing linguistics, consumer welfare, and choice
architecture. Ruth has published work on the sound
patterns of top brand names, which suggests that
sound symbolism may be one factor contributing
to brand performance. Her research on choice
architecture and consumer welfare (conditionally accepted at the Journal
of Marketing Research) shows that encouraging people to articulate their
preferences before making choices can attenuate defaults not serving
consumers’ best interests. Ruth’s dissertation investigates methods for
helping people make better choices by debiasing consumer behaviors
rooted in reference dependence. She graduated summa cum laude with
a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of New Mexico, and
earned her M.B.A. from the University of Montana with honors.
Vahid Rahmani
Old Dominion University
Vahid graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in
Business Administration from University of Tehran
and a Master’s degree in International Business
from the University of Shahid Beheshti. He is
currently a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Old
Dominion University. Vahid’s research is focused
on consumer persuasion knowledge, pricing, and
digital marketing. He has published 9 conference proceedings, and he is
finalizing the manuscripts of two of his papers, one of which is composed
of six empirical studies, for journal submissions. He has taught eight
courses at Old Dominion University, including Marketing Principles and
Problems, Multinational Marketing, and Consumer Behavior, which
were well received by his students. Vahid has worked in marketing and
managerial positions in industry for more than six years , in both B2B
and B2C sectors. During which time, he managed, or was involved in, a
number of large-scale marketing projects, including marketing research,
sales forecasting, and new-product development.
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Sebastian Sadowski
University of Groningen
I am currently a doctoral candidate at the University
of Groningen, under the supervision of prof. dr.
Bob Fennis and prof. dr. Koert van Ittersum. My
dissertation, ‘Keep your eye on the ball! The effect
of motivated tuning on the effectiveness of subtle
marketing stimuli’ investigates the effectiveness
of subtle environmental stimuli on consumer
decision-making. Specifically, I zoom in on the process of broadening
and narrowing of attention, showing how this attentional tuning effect
influences consumers. In my dissertation we concentrate on priming
effects, distinguishing between both goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant
primes. Additionally, we also examine how attentional tuning guides
product choices when consumers experience choice overload. In my spare
time I love discovering music, traveling, visiting concerts and jogging.
Ainslie Schultz
University of Arizona
Ainslie Schultz is a doctoral candidate in the
marketing department at the University of
Arizona’s Eller College of Management. Her
research interests lie at the interface between
marketing and psychology with a focus on improving
consumer decision-making and performance. In her
dissertation research, she measures and validates
consumers’ belief in the power of “Fresh Starts” (R&R JCR) and examines
whether prompting a “Fresh Start” can help consumers perform better
when they struggle with a difficult task, such as saving money (JMR
submission). Her program of research provides evidence in support of
recent legislative initiatives such as the IRS Fresh Start program and
Fresh Start Mortgage Legislation in addition to marketing campaigns by
Adidas, Home Depot, and Bank of America that encourage consumers
to make a fresh start. Ainslie has presented her research at the Society
for Consumer Psychology, Association for Consumer Research, and
the Robert Mittelstaedt Doctoral Symposium, where she won the Most
Interesting Paper Award based on a doctoral dissertation. Ainslie holds a
BS in Marketing from Bradley University and MS in Marketing from Texas
A&M University. Prior to joining the marketing PhD program, she worked
as an analyst for IMS Research.
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Marissa Sharif
UCLA
Marissa Sharif is a fourth year PhD candidate
at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her
research interests include motivation, judgment and
decision-making, and memory. In her dissertation,
she investigates how to increase goal persistence
by offering slack with a cost, termed an “emergency
reserve.” In another major stream of research, she
investigates how context-dependent memory can affect judgments and
choices. Her work is under review at Journal of Marketing Research,
Psychological Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, and Journal of Marketing Behavior. Prior to entering the
doctoral program, Marissa graduated cum laude from UCLA with a
Bachelor of Science in Psychobiology.
Travis Simkins
University of Wyoming
Travis Simkins is a PhD candidate in Marketing and
Sustainable Business Practices at the University
of Wyoming. He is interested in international
marketing, macromarketing, strategy and empirical
modeling research. Specifically, his research
examines U.S. exporter commitment in light of
structural irregularities in the Mexican importation
process at the “Border Black Hole” between the United States and
Mexico. Travis also examines conflicting policy and regulatory structures
in products transitioning from illicit to legal that force individuals to
engage in “involuntary deviance” in order to fully participate in the
marketplace. Travis holds a Master’s Degree in International Management
from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Prior to his doctoral
work, Travis worked with a large multi-national Fortune 500 global
logistics and freight forwarding company specializing in U.S. and Mexican
Customs Brokerage and cross border transportation. Later, he was
the COO of a privately held investment group managing a portfolio of
business interests. Finally, as an entrepreneur, he developed, financed,
and operated his own successful business. Travis has several publications
in the Journal of Macromarketing and forthcoming work in the Journal of
Management and Organization.
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Andrey Simonov
University of Chicago
Andrey Simonov is currently a Ph.D. candidate
in Quantitative Marketing at the University of
Chicago Booth. Prior to the Ph.D. program, Andrey
received a BSc in Economics at Moscow State
University, Russia, MSc in Econometrics and MPhil
in Marketing at Tilburg University, Netherlands.
Andrey’s research interests lie in the areas of online
advertisement, media economics, and applied industrial organization. He
has been an intern at Microsoft Research, working with Bing search and
advertising data to understand the value of advertisement and the effect
of competition on brand search. In his dissertation work, Andrey studies
the consumer demand for biased information. Andrey focuses on a case
study of online news consumption in Russia and uses demand estimates
to measure the effectiveness of government control of the news.
Carrie Skinner
Florida State University
Carrie is a doctoral candidate in marketing at
Florida State University. Her broad area of
interest is consumer behavior. Specifically, she
focuses on social perception, the psychology of
money, transformative consumer research, and
consumption decision making including spending
and eating behavior. Her dissertation is focused on
social perception based on spending behavior along with appearance,
conspicuous consumption and materialism, and how these variables
interact in the formation of social judgements and subsequent treatment
by employees and other individuals in a retail setting. Her work has
received a transformative consumer research grant. Carrie’s professional
experience is in retail and marketing research including positions at
Macy’s and Coach and a research project for an industrial firm. She
received a BA in marketing and an MBA from the University of Kentucky.
She has taught undergraduate courses in basic marketing concepts and
consumer behavior.
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Adam Smith
Ohio State University
Adam Smith is a PhD candidate in marketing at
The Ohio State University. His research focuses
on developing and estimating models of demand
to answer questions about product competition,
consumer heterogeneity, and pricing. Other
research interests include Bayesian statistics and
associated computational methods. He holds a
master’s degree in statistics and a bachelor’s degree in economics from
Ohio State.
Meredith Thomas
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Meredith Thomas is a doctoral student in Marketing
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She
will complete the PhD program in May 2018.
Meredith’s research interests lie at the intersection
of community and material culture. Specifically,
her dissertation research explores the evolutionary
nature of face-to-face community, and the role
of the market in helping consumers pursue and achieve community
in a neighborhood setting. She also studies the impact of residential
segregation on social capital accumulation and consumption styles, as
well as the social forces that influence consumers’ subjective valuation
of money. Meredith’s work has been presented at the Consumer Culture
Theory Conference, Albert Haring Symposium, Robert Mittelstaedt
Doctoral Symposium and the AMA Marketing and Public Policy
Conference. Meredith’s teaching interests include consumer behavior,
branding, promotional strategy, marketing communications, qualitative
research methods, and corporate and social responsibility. Prior to her
doctoral program, Meredith earned her MBA, worked in new product
development for Anheuser-Busch, Inc., served as executive director for a
local chamber of commerce, and worked in marketing and public relations
at a large public university.
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Zahra Tohidinia
University of Connecticut
Zahra Tohidinia is a doctoral student at University
of Connecticut. Her research explores consumer
decision making, specifically in moral dilemmas and
situations that involve self-enhancements. Zahra is
also interested in word of mouth and its influence
on interpersonal perceptions. In one of her Word
of Mouth projects she looks at personality cues in
online language use and the way they affect perceptions of those who
refer to online reviews as a source of information. Her preliminary results
were presented at the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) held
in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 2015. She received her MBA from
University of Tehran and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
from Shahid Beheshti University.
Setiadi Umar
Rutgers University
Setiadi Umar is a PhD Candidate in the Marketing
Department at Rutgers Business School.
His research interest lies in strategic issues that
managers face in product management. Currently,
he focuses on competitive effects on market
segment selection and product development and
launch decisions. He usually utilizes secondary
data and tests theoretically driven hypothesis using econometric models.
He recently co-authored an article published in Marketing Letters that
investigates the length of product modification cycles in the automotive
industry. His dissertation investigates the effects of competition in
market segment entry and exit decisions. At this moment, he is also
finalizing another paper that develops and tests a theoretical model
regarding the drivers of product modifications from an exploration /
exploitation perspective. His work has been presented at the INFORMS
and Mid-Atlantic Marketing Doctoral Symposium.
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Prasad Vana
London Business School
Prasad Vana is a PhD candidate in Marketing at
London Business School. His research interests
focus on developing empirical models of behavior in
various online settings. His current research focuses
on modelling donor behavior in crowdfunding
charities. In this research, he develops a structural
model of how (at the time of the donation) donors
evaluate the uncertainty about whether a crowdfunding campaign
would ultimately reach its target or not and how this uncertainty affects
the amount they donate. His findings suggest that displaying the right
information may nudge potential donors to better assess the uncertainty,
leading to higher donations and project completion rates. His past work
has focused on modelling customer behavior in online cashback shopping
and group buying. Prior to joining London Business School, Prasad worked
as a transportation consultant in Columbus, Ohio. His past education
includes an MS in Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and
B.Tech in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Scott Wallace
Duke University
Scott recently completed his fourth year as a
PhD student in Consumer Behavior at Duke’s
Fuqua School of Business, where his dissertation
committee is co-chaired by Jordan Etkin and Jim
Bettman. Scott is broadly interested in many
aspects of marketing and behavior. His current
research spans the areas of consumer goal pursuit
and judgment and decision making, exploring the influence of goal-related
judgments on consumer motivation. His dissertation research looks at the
role of reference points in goal pursuit. In particular, his work considers
how reference points shape motivation by making goal-related actions
seem more or less impactful. Prior to attending Duke, Scott received
his undergraduate degree in Marketing from the McIntire School of
Commerce at the University of Virginia.
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Cindy Wang
University of Oregon
Cindy Wang is a PhD candidate in marketing at
University of Oregon. Her research interests center
on social influences on consumer behavior. She
mainly explores the effect of sense of power on
individuals’ decision-making in various pro-social
contexts, such as healthy food consumption,
recycling, and public transportation. In her
dissertation, she examines two common message persuasion techniques,
message assertiveness and message framing; and how they are informed
and influenced by various power states. For example, her research shows
that assertive message is actually very effective in promoting healthy
eating at low power state. She is actively exploring how to motivate low
power individuals or people in low power states to do more social good for
others and for themselves. Prior to joining the PhD program, she worked
as a logistics specialist in A.P. Moller-Maersk Group and Evergreen
Marine Corp. and as a business consultant at Triton Energy. Cindy has
taught marketing principles and consumer behavior courses at University
of Oregon.
T.J. Weber
Washington State University
T.J. Weber is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Carson
College of Business at Washington State University.
T.J.’s research is on how marketing interventions
can motivate pro-social consumer decision-making
in the areas of health, the environment, and public
policy as a whole. His dissertation explores how
political orientation affects consumer decisionmaking after campaign finance deregulation in the United States
allowed firms to expand their influence to areas outside their financial
self-interest. In 2015, T.J. was named the Carson College of Business’s
Doctoral Student Researcher of the Year after his article in the Journal
of Advertising on vaccination behavior was featured in the New York
Times, Washington Post, and on NPR News. Prior to coming to W.S.U.,
T.J. earned his B.S. in marketing from Northern Michigan University, his
M.B.A. from Marquette University, and worked for a U.S. Congressman.
Overall, T.J. is focused on finding ways society can use marketing to
improve consumer welfare.
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Evan Weingarten
University of Pennsylvania
Evan Weingarten is a fourth-year doctoral
student at the Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania. His research broadly focuses on
the effects of memory and attention on consumer
decision-making. One research stream shows how
affective and cognitive feelings (such as difficulty)
accessed during recall influence experiential
evaluations. Projects in this stream use both meta-analytical and
empirical methods to answer questions such as how these feelings sway
judgments, what parts of experiences most strongly affect how people
judge them, and how emotions shape willingness to talk with others. A
second stream examines how the recency and frequency with which
people examine information in a stimulus-based (all relevant information
present) decision-making environment affects product evaluations. Evan
graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in
Economics and Psychology.
Jun Yan
University of Manitoba
Jun (Wendy) Yan is a PhD candidate in Marketing,
University of Manitoba. Her research interests
are brand rejection, the dynamic process of
brand power, the influence of environmental
cues on consumption and prosocial behavior, and
the relationship between giving and happiness.
With a Bachelor Degree of Economics, Master
Degree of Strategy Management and PhD program in Marketing, she
analyzes consumer behaviors from both macroscopic and microscopic
perspectives. She has working papers titled “Want to Express but Have
to Suppress: Effect of Self Construal on Emotional Suppression and
Expression” and “Mechanism of the Negative Effect of Brand Rejection:
Ego Threat and Defense Mechanism” for SCP 2015, “Rejecting a Job
Applicant Can Drive Away a Potential Consumer: Organization Brand
Rejection” for ACR 2015, and “The Interaction Effects of Types of
Organization Brand Rejection and Self Esteem” for SCP 2016. Also, Jun
(Wendy) worked as a reviewer of working papers for ACR 2016. During
her PhD program, she earned a Canadian Credit Mgmt Foundation Ph.D.
Fellowship, International Graduate Student Scholarship, and Faculty of
Graduate Student Award.
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Bicheng Yang
Washington University, St. Louis
Bicheng Yang is a PhD student studying
Quantitative Marketing at Olin Business School
of Washington University in St. Louis. She has
conducted research in salesforce management,
advertising and pricing. Her job market paper
uses a dynamic structural model to study the
influence of internal labor market on salesperson’s
performance. In another project, she builds a salesforce-driven consumer
choice model on the salesforce management literature and the consumer
choice literature. Prior to entering the PhD program, Bicheng obtained
a B.E. degree in Finance and a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Nankai
University, China, and an M.A. degree in Economics from Duke University.
Bingqing (Miranda) Yin
University of Kansas
Bingqing (Miranda) Yin is a PhD candidate in
Marketing at the University of Kansas. Broadly, her
research focuses on charitable donations and gift
giving. Her dissertation examines how different
types of pre-giving incentives accompanying charity
appeals affect people’s donation behaviors. Results
of her studies show that prospective donors’ default
perceived relationship with charities tends to be communal. However,
including monetary (versus non-monetary or no) pre-giving incentives
increases perceived exchange relationship, and leads to lower donations.
Bingqing currently serves as the PhD Team Representative to the KU
Business School Assembly. She was a doctoral fellow at both the 24th
and 25th Annual Mittelstaedt Symposiums. Outside of her academic
pursuits, she enjoys traveling, swimming, discovering tasty food and
watching movies.
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Sangsuk Yoon
Temple University
Sangsuk Yoon is a 4th year PhD student in
marketing department at Fox School of Business
and a research assistant at the Center for Neural
Decision Making at Temple University. His main
research interest is to investigate underlying
cognitive processes of consumer judgment and
decision making using a multi-methodological
approach that includes behavioral, eye-tracking, and fMRI. Specifically,
Sangsuk has been working on the psychological mechanisms of the
anchoring effect on valuations, risky decision making under two different
presentation formats (description-based vs. experience-based), and
how different decision mode (e.g., choosing something preferred versus
rejecting something not preferred) influences information searching
pattern and subsequent judgments and decisions.
Xiaoqian Yu
University of Southern California.
Xiaoqian Yu is a marketing PhD candidate at
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern
California. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil
Engineering, and two master’s degrees in Decision
Science and Engineering. Her research interests
include crowdfunding, quantitative structural
modeling, behavioral economics and empirical
industrial organization. In her current research she uses structural models
to study how effort-based incentives affect crowdfunders’ contribution
behavior, how different funding sources interact on crowdfunding
platforms, the influence of monetary incentives on funding projects
performance, and the managerial implications based on individuals’
heterogeneous reactions to effort-based incentives.
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Ke Zhang
University of Hong Kong.
Ke Zhang is a third-year PhD student in Marketing
(Consumer Behavior) at the University of Hong
Kong. He received a B.S. degree in Psychology and
a M.S. degree in Marketing from Peking University,
China. His main research interests include (1)
consumer belief and judgment, (2) consumption
experience, and (3) technology and marketing. One
of his recent research projects has explored how anthropomorphized
design in game helper will undermine consumers’ enjoyment in computer
games. Ke Zhang has also served as trainee reviewer for JCR.
Shaoling (Katee) Zhang
University of Massachusetts
Shaoling (Katee) Zhang is a PhD candidate in
Marketing from Isenberg School of Management
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She
holds a B.S. in Electronic Commerce and a M.S.
in Management Science and Engineering. Her
research interests are new product development,
marketing innovation, social media and content
marketing. Her substantive areas are econometrics and social network
analysis. Prior to beginning the PhD program in Marketing, she worked
on a variety of research projects, involving quantitative analysis on
evaluating the effects of retention strategies for the telecom providers
and comparing the effects of different online advertising strategies. She
is currently working on two research projects on marketing strategies for
innovation, including exploring how firms can use marketing innovation to
achieve competitive advantage and how firms can pattern technological
and marketing innovation to sustain advantage. In addition, she develops
her dissertation topic in exploring how different forms of user- and
firm-generated content (e.g., texts, images, and videos) from the online
communities interact to assist customer decision-making, thus causing
different effects among various content marketing strategies. In her
spare time, she enjoys reading books and playing string instruments. She
is also an outdoor enthusiast for hiking and skiing.
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CONSORTIUM FELLOWS
Mohammad Zia
University of Texas at Dallas
Mohammad Zia is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate
at Naveen Jindal School of Management at The
University of Texas at Dallas. His main area of
research is search engine advertising, consumer
online search and choice behavior, and online
travel agencies. Mohammad uses game theory
and econometrics tools to solve interesting and
managerially useful research problems. In his current research on paid
search advertising, he studies the strategic behavior of advertisers, such
as budget allocation and bid coordination, across multiple search engines.
At UTD, Mohammad teaches principles of marketing to undergraduate
students. He received both his undergraduate degree in electrical
engineering and his MBA from Sharif University of Technology. In his
free time, Mohammad loves to play Santoor, a traditional Persian musical
instrument. He is also an awesome cook!
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AMA-SHETH FOUNDATION DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM