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CONSORTIUM FELLOWS

Annika Abell University of South Florida As a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida, Annika Abell is a behavioral researcher with interests in sensory marketing, digital & social media marketing, and healthful consumption. Several of her projects focus on choices related to underprivileged children and adults. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, Annika owned a digital marketing agency specializing in social media. She has also worked as a graphic designer. As a former entrepreneur, she is always keen to collaborate with companies on research projects. For her research, she has recently teamed up with an international hotel chain, elementary and middle schools, restaurants, and a supermarket. Annika has a degree in Advertising from Stuttgart Media School in Germany. She has presented her work at major conferences including AMA and AMS, where she received the best student paper award in 2016. She has received two grants from the Association of Consumer Research (TCR group) for her research related to economically underprivileged consumer groups. Annika developed (and is currently teaching) an undergraduate digital marketing course at the University of South Florida.

Mina Ameri University of Texas at Dallas Mina is a PhD candidate in marketing at University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are quantitative marketing and, in particular, online streaming market and social dynamics within this market. For her dissertation, she studies how people’s friendship networks evolve over time along with their activities, how and through what mechanisms these friendship networks along with community network influence people’s decision of what to watch, and how their modus of watching (specifically “binge-watching”) changes their engagement with a show’s “franchise.” Mina is also the winner of best paper award at 2016 Texas PhD Conference. Prior to her PhD, Mina got her MSc in marketing and her BA in electrical engineering. She also has experience as a marketing expert in a multi-brand company.

Eda Anlamlier University of Illinois at Chicago Eda Anlamlier is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research investigates consumer behaviors that can result in alternative forms of status acquisition with and without the help of high-status brands. In her papers, she examines how non-traditional forms of conspicuous consumption (e.g., digital, through rental products), experiential versus material purchases, and access-based consumption alter individuals’ product perceptions. She mainly focuses on consumers’ self and product perception on social media and their subsequent product attitudes. Under the supervision of Professor David Gal, Eda’s dissertation analyzes how conspicuous consumption on social media influences products’ experiential assessment and status perception. She presented her research at the American Marketing Association Conference, Association for Consumer Research Conference, and Society for Consumer Psychology Conference. She has personally designed and instructs introductory and global marketing courses. Eda holds a Master’s of Science in Psychology from Koc University, Turkey and a Bachelor’s of Art (Honors) in Management from Bogazici University, Turkey.

2017 AMA-SHETH Foundation Doctoral Consortium

She has previously managed corporate social media accounts; created local and global marketing campaigns.

Vivek Astvansh Western University Vivek is a third-year marketing doctoral candidate at the Ivey Business School, Western University, Canada. His primary research interest is in theorizing and empirically assessing how marketing capabilities (e.g., supplier relationships, customer orientation, channel management) can help firms respond to, and potentially recover from adversity (e.g., product recall, data breaches, firm bankruptcy). For his empirical research, Vivek uses machine learning techniques and econometric methods. Vivek's teaching interests are in big data analytics, marketing analytics, digital/Internet marketing, and entrepreneurial marketing. Vivek studied computer engineering in his undergrad, and business management and social science research in his two masters' degrees. He worked in the high-tech industry in South Asia, Middle East, and the U.S. for twelve years before joining academia.

Amin Attari University of Kansas Amin Attari is a fourth year PhD candidate in marketing at the University of Kansas. Amin’s primary research interest is consumer judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. He uses insights from psychology and economics to investigate consumer behavior in different marketing contexts. Amin has an MBA from the University of Tehran and has worked as a product manager in both B2C and B2B companies. He has taught Managing Brands at the University of Kansas, School of Business.

Sara Baskentli Baruch Sara Baskentli is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Baruch College, City University of New York. Sara conducts research in the area of consumer behavior, with specific interests in food decision-making, consumer biases and im(moral) behaviors. She was recently named a winner of a doctoral student research grant from CUNY. Some of Sara’s work has been published in Journal of Public Policy and Marketing and has been presented at multiple conferences including ACR. Sara received her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Bilkent University and her master’s degree in Marketing from University of Cincinnati.

Carlos Bauer University of Texas at San Antonio Carlos Bauer University of Texas at San Antonio Carlos Bauer is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a research fellow at the Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy at the Foster School of Business – The University of Washington. His research interests include relationship marketing dynamics, relational selling, social networks in sales, and distribution strategies in digital markets. His dissertation focuses on relational contracts for exclusive products in two-sided markets, the dynamic effects of relational investments over time, and the perceived value of relational investments. His work has appeared at various conferences including the American Marketing Association Summer and


Winter Educator’s Conference; the International Marketing SIG in Havana, Cuba; the American Consumer Research conference, and the Society for Consumer Psychology conference. Carlos was also named a fellow at the ISBM Business Marketing Doctoral Consortium, and at the Mallen Conference hosted by Yale and Yeshiva universities. His working experience includes roles in academia and industry both in the US and overseas. Currently, Carlos serves as the ex-officio president of the PhD Project marketing doctoral consortium.

Frank Beke University of Groningen Frank Beke is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the University of Groningen. His research is focused on informational privacy, in particular the influence on relationships between firms and consumers. While marketing has become more data-driven, more understanding is needed why consumers accept or reject information collection. In his dissertation, he develops a scale to measure the privacy calculus (trade-off) that better explains when and why consumers accept information collection by firms. In addition, he investigates how firms' privacy strategy affects choice consumers make. Besides the scientific contribution, his dissertation tries to provide guidance to firms still struggling with how to manage consumer privacy. Frank earned a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Groningen. He received a M.S. in Marketing (Strategy and Intelligence) from the University of Groningen.

Jason Bell University of Iowa Jason Bell received a master's degree in economics from The University of Iowa in 2010, and is now a PhD candidate in marketing, expecting to graduate in 2018. His main research interest is consideration set formation, especially for durable goods.

Manuel Berkmann University of Cologne Manuel Berkmann is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at the Institute for Retailing and Customer Management at the University of Cologne, Germany. His research interests are in the domain of business-to-business marketing and service and sales management. In particular, his current projects focus on customer engagement in B2B and the changing role of frontline employees in industrial markets. He received a Diploma (M.S. equivalent) in business administration from the University of Mannheim, Germany. Prior to starting his career in academia, he worked for four years as a senior consultant for an international consulting firm specializing in marketing, sales and pricing. Besides research, he enjoys outdoor sports activities and daily life with his family.


Raghu Bommaraju University of Houston Raghu Bommaraju is a fourth year doctoral student at the University of Houston. He holds an MS in Quantitative Economics from Indian Statistical Institute and an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur, India. Raghu won the AMA 2017 Best Paper Award by theme (Human Capital) for one of his research papers. Raghu has a two essay dissertation with a focus on empirical marketing strategy. His first essay investigates the role of image in the success or failure of M&As. The results indicate that, even in the absence of job uncertainty, mismatch of images of the firms negatively influences performance. The second essay of the dissertation examines whether the presence of a customer in the boardroom influences firm performance. The results demonstrate that having a customer in the boardroom positively influences firm performance. Moreover, in the absence of marketing personnel in the top management, a customer in the boardroom is more vital.

Dominique Braxton University of California- Irvine Dominique is a PhD Candidate in marketing at The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Her research leverages experimental methods to understand customer experience, specifically in the shopping context. Her dissertation is centered on the relationship between technology integration in retail stores and customer experience. In particular, she explores the impact of technology integration on the customer’s cognitive and emotional experience in a retail store. In addition to her dissertation work, she is working on projects in judgement and decision making with regard to social media and customer experience. Dominique is also teaching an undergraduate course in digital marketing at The Paul Merage School of Business, and has previously taught consumer behavior and advertising promotion. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Dominique earned her Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and has worked in retailing sectors from high end luxury retailers to thrift stores.

Melanie Brucks Stanford Melanie Brucks is a third-year doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research interests focus on creative cognition and innovation. Her current project investigates cognitive processes in creativity competitions and demonstrates that pursuing the goal to be creative can ironically backfire, hindering creative performance. Another project explores the interplay of technological innovation and creativity, examining how virtual communication impacts various stages of creative cognition. Melanie received her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from University of Arizona in 2013.


Adam Cann Texas Tech University Adam is a doctoral candidate in the Texas Tech University Marketing program. His research focuses on the influences of emotions, attitudes, and humor on consumer behavior.

Xinyu Cao Massachusetts Institute of Technology Xinyu Cao is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is broadly interested in consumer behavior and firm strategies in online platforms. Her research methodologies include field experiments, analytical modeling and structural modeling. One of her dissertation essays explores “cooperative search advertising.” Based on analysis of manufacturer-retailer interactions when bidding for the same brand keyword, she derives optimal bidding strategies for manufacturers. Another dissertation essay of her studies the phenomenon of “rational spamming.” She finds that it is an optimal strategy for competing firms to advertise excessively to consumers on social media, even though too much communication drives consumers away. Prior to joining MIT, Xinyu received a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics from Tsinghua University in China, and a Master’s degree in Operations Research from UC Berkeley.

Melis Ceylan Koc University Melis Ceylan is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Koç University Graduate School of Business, expecting to graduate by summer 2018. She holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Southern California, and two B.S. degrees in Mathematics & Computer Science and in Computer Engineering from Bahçeşehir University. Melis was awarded Fulbright scholarship for her academic studies in the U.S. Before joining the Koç Ph.D. program, she also studied Marketing at graduate level at New York University for two years. Melis is broadly interested in two areas of research: self-conscious emotions and social exclusion. Across her work, Melis aims to understand and explain consumer behavior in different substantive domains such as food consumption decisions, self-improvement motivations, and engaging in altruistic behaviors. Melis has presented her research at national and international conferences and symposiums such as Society for Consumer Psychology and Alternative Research Methods Symposium in Marketing Research.


Yupeng Chen University of Pennsylvania Yupeng is a fourth-year doctoral student in Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include referral program, loyalty program, and preference estimation. Prior to Wharton, he obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University in 2015 and his B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 2009.

JeeWon (Brianna) Choi Georgia State University Brianna is a doctoral candidate in marketing at Georgia State University. Her research interests focus on empirical marketing strategy, with an emphasis on customer experience and entertainment marketing. In her selected stream of research, she seeks to understand the consumer’s journey with the firm through different firm-initiated marketing efforts. To answer her research questions, she applies econometric and statistical models. She has publications in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and in Journal of Marketing Research. Her dissertation focuses on the early assessment of new products in the film industry context. Brianna has received a Bachelor’s degree in marketing, finance, and marketing & operations management from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the doctoral program, Brianna worked as an economic consultant.

Nivriti Chowdhry Rice University Nivriti (Nivi) is a fourth year marketing student at Rice Business School in Houston, Texas. Her research is focused on judgment and decision making. Within judgment and decision making, Nivi focuses on two streams: financial decision making and information seeking behavior. In her current work, she studies the interactive effect of financial self-awareness and financial literacy on downstream financial behaviors.

Qian (Claire) Deng University of Alberta Qian (Claire) Deng is a Ph.D. Candidate majoring in marketing in Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta. She earned her MPhil degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and her Bachelor Degree of Management from Fudan University, China. Claire’s primary research interest focuses on the concept of congruity in marketing. One branch of her research tries to use meta-analysis to examine the effect pattern of congruity across various application areas of marketing, including brand extensions, product designs, advertising, event sponsorship and so on. Another branch of her research focuses on examining consumers’ evaluation and behavioural responses toward extremely incongruent product designs. In addition, her research interests also include consumer behavior, congruity/incongruity theory, meta-analysis, retail atmospherics and analytics, and


hospitality and tourism marketing. Claire’s teaching interests include marketing research, introduction to marketing, consumer behavior, and retail management.

Ryan Dew Columbia University Ryan Dew is a fourth year doctoral student in Marketing at Columbia University, focusing on quantitative marketing. His research studies how modern statistical and computational methods can automate and enhance the capacity of marketing managers to make data-driven decisions. He is particularly interested in topics in marketing analytics, customer relationship management, and preference measurement, with a focus on understanding dynamics in consumer purchasing patterns. He is also interested in incorporating visual and textual data into marketing models, with a specific interest in understanding the interplay between the stated and visual identities of brands, and in bringing big data to bear on firms' design decisions. Methodologically, he focuses on techniques from Bayesian econometrics, Bayesian nonparametrics, and machine learning. Much of his work, including a forthcoming paper in Marketing Science, has explored how deep underlying patterns in dynamic purchasing processes can be uncovered with Bayesian nonparametric Gaussian process priors. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, Ryan graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Mathematics, with a focus on applied statistics.

Grant Donnelly Harvard University Grant is a doctoral candidate in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. He studies decision-making with a specific interest in improving consumer welfare. Grant studies ways to make consumers make better consumer decisions- from how to save more for retirement to how to eat healthier food. In a forthcoming paper at Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Grant and his colleagues find that consumers who dispose of their unwanted goods through social recycling (e.g., giving unwanted goods to unspecified recipients at no cost) increases consumer happiness- relative to trashing good, traditional recycling and donating- because of increased perceptions of helping others and the environment. Grant received his B.A. in Environmental Science (Urban Design) from San Francisco State in 2005 and a M.A. in Psychological Research (Mind, Brain & Behavior) from San Francisco State in 2013.

Jinzhao Du Duke University Jinzhao Du is a Marketing PhD student at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. He is interested in platform-based marketing and media markets. His dissertation investigates the strategic interaction among the participants in a media market ––– content suppliers, advertisers, media platforms, news aggregators, and consumers ––– and answers important managerial questions on a media platforms' pricing strategy, content provision, and the role of news aggregators. Jinzhao holds a BA in economics from School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in China.


Kristen Duke University of California – San Diego Kristen Duke is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego. She investigates how consumers form judgments, make decisions, and experience the outcomes of those decisions, particularly when they involve risk, uncertainty, or emotional complexity. In her dissertation research, she explores the intertemporal dynamics of guilt, studying its time-course and the emotional and behavioral consequences of separating guilt-inducing decisions from their enactment. In a second stream of research, she identifies consequences of the way information is presented to consumers. Her research explores how the presentation of probabilities affects decision-making under risk, how the framing of monetary incentives fosters social norm inferences, and how (in)consistency in the presentation of tasks influences individuals’ perceptions of their performance. Prior to graduate school, Kristen received a B.A. in Economics and Psychology from The College of New Jersey.

Linying (Sophie) Fan Hong Kong Polytechnic University My name is Linying (Sophie) Fan, a 3rd year Marketing PhD student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My research interests are in the area of consumer psychology. Specifically, my research interests focus on understanding how consumers' judgments and decisions are shaped by resource constraints and social influence, such as social exclusion, resource scarcity, social crowdedness, and salience of other’s identity. My dissertation research investigates the influence of resource scarcity on consumer evaluations. Essay 1 proposes a Maximization-Reallocation-Efficientization (MRE) Model to explain how and why consumers use different strategies to cope with resource scarcity. Essay 2 examines how a general sense of resource availability affects consumer effort exertion during the pursuit of rewards. Essay 3 investigates how and why resource scarcity increases attractiveness of range marketing offers.

Hajar Fatemi McGill University Hajar is a PhD candidate in marketing at Desautels faculty of management at McGill university. Her research interests mainly focus on social marketing, prosocial behavior, marketing strategies, self-regulation and food-related decision making. Hajar’s thesis looks at impact of prosociality on preference for products. Her research has awarded full funding from government of Quebec (Quebec Fonds Société et Culture (FQRSC)), Danone Institute of Canada and Rathlyn Foundation. Hajar has published a paper on interaction of marketing activities and biological predispositions and their impact on impulsive eating. Her second published paper explores food-related decision making and how association between healthiness and taste depends on food type and culture. As a research assistant, Hajar has contributed to several research projects in McGill Center for Convergence of Health and Economics. Before joining McGill, she completed master studies in information technology management and undergraduate studies in industrial engineering. Hajar worked as a consultant in various service industries for five years.


Amir Fazli University of Washington My interests include cloud computing, B2B marketing, and pricing strategies. My dissertation focuses on the marketing implications of cloud computing for web-based firms. Specifically, I study how the autoscaling feature of the cloud affects new product launch. I also study the effects of various pricing strategies implemented by cloud service providers. I use game theory models to better understand the strategic forces in the cloud computing industry. I am always looking to expand my knowledge in marketing and hope to contribute to the field as much as I can.

Elena Fumagalli HEC Paris Elena Fumagalli is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Marketing at HEC Paris. Prior to entering the PhD program, she received her B.A. in Language Expert for Business at Cattolica University in Milan and her M.Sc. in Marketing Management at Bocconi University. Elena’s research interests include Identity Threats and Compensatory Consumption, Consumers Identity Negotiation, and Affective and Motivational Processes. More specifically, her main line of work examines how consumers manage multiple identities in a variety of situations such as when they face self-threatening events (e.g., failure on a test) or when they face resource scarcity contingencies (e.g., time allocation between work and parenting). Moreover, she is interested in untangling the nature of possible self-discrepancies that consumers might face during their consumption experiences (affective, cognitive, motivational, conscious/unconscious). For example, in one of her working papers, she is investigating whether experiencing negative emotions could lead to identity threats and spill over to compensatory behaviors in the consumption sphere. Finally, in one of her affective and motivational projects, she is investigating how feelings of entitlement and gratitude might shape consumer’s reactions to firms deciding to terminate preferential treatment benefits.

Prachi Gala University of Mississippi Prachi Gala is a third year Marketing PhD candidate at the University of Mississippi. Her main research interests lie in the area of marketing strategy, packaging, retailing and public policy. In the area of marketing strategy, she has worked on various personalities of CEOs and their impact on the strategies of the firms. She has received the Best Paper Award in the Marketing Strategy Track at the SMA, 2016. She has presented her research in AMA, SMA, MMA, Academy of International Business (AIB) India Chapter Conference and Asia Pacific International Conference. She has taught Introduction to retailing, Principles of Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Originally from India, she received her MBA in Marketing and her bachelors in IT engineering from Mumbai University, India. Professionally, Prachi has worked as a Business Analyst in Deloitte Consulting, as a researcher in IMRB and Faber castell. In her free time, Prachi enjoys travelling, painting and involving in social work.


Alireza Golmohammadi University of Arkansas Alireza Golmohammadi is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at the Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas. He is broadly interested in marketing strategy, with a special focus on social media, as well as services. In one of his recent projects which combines his two areas of interest, he studied how service new ventures’ communication style on social media can help them gain legitimacy and raise the much-needed funding. In his dissertation, Alireza distinguishes between different types of firm-generated-content on social media, and explores their direct as well as interactive impacts on a large sample of S&P 500 companies. Alireza has a paper under fourth round of review at the Journal of Services Research, and two others under review at Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. He has also presented his work at various conferences, including 2017 AMA Winter Conference, and 39th Annual ISMS Marketing Science Conference, among others.

Lauren Grewal University of Pittsburgh Lauren Grewal is a fourth year doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests lie at the intersection of identity and consumption, social media/ digital technology, and public policy. Lauren’s dissertation examines the way that consumers and marketers navigate various types of identities, both offline (i.e., food decision making) and online (i.e., posting on social media). Other projects examine the impact of mobile devices on consumer opinions, food waste, social outcomes to encouragement, and gratitude expressions online. Her research is past the first round of the review process at multiple leading marketing journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Marketing. She was named an Honorable Mention award winner of the Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition (2016) and the CB Sig Rising Star winner at Winter AMA (2016-2017). Additionally, Lauren currently serves as the president of the doctoral student organization at the Katz Graduate School of Business and as the PhD rep to the SCP Executive Board. Prior to joining the PhD program, Lauren received bachelor degrees in Psychology and Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Tong Guo University of Michigan Tong's research interest lies in the intersection of marketing and healthcare. Specifically, she applies machine learning methods to study the effects from mandated disclosure of the pharmaceutical marketing activities directed to physicians in quasi-experimental settings. Her job market paper uncovers the unintended effect from mandated disclosure, discussing how the increased payment transparency might motivate firms to pay more to physicians, a consequence that is contrary to the policy makers’ intention. She provides estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects at physician-drug level, and explains the heterogeneity with different mechanisms. In her second paper, Tong studies how the mandated payment disclosure (under Massachusetts Sunshine Law) reduces physician prescriptions of branded statins, antidepressants and antipsychotics. Ultimately, she wants to help policy makers and pharmaceutical firms to design better marketing interventions. More broadly, Tong is interested in designing better incentive schemes for targeted agents. Her third paper investigates the incentive of frequent flyer program tiers on consumer choice of the airline.


Aditya Gupta University of Nebraska-Lincoln Aditya Gupta is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Marketing department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research focuses broadly on experiential marketing and hedonic aspects of consumption, along with a particular interest in surprise and gifting. Coupled with that he also likes looking at macromarketing perspectives of current market phenomena such as business groups, consumer vulnerability, and sustainability. He has trained as a mixed-methods researcher in order to be able to use both qualitative and quantitative methods depending on the research objective. He is originally from India which is where he got his Bachelor’s degree in Economics (Delhi University) and a Master’s degree in Marketing (SPJIMR, Mumbai). He followed his MBA with a three-year professional stint in sales and marketing at Procter and Gamble. Realizing that academe was better suited to his interests, he made a career transition in the fall of 2014 and started his Ph.D. at UNL.

Jerry Han University of Texas Jerry Han is a doctoral student focusing on consumer behavior in the Marketing department at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a B.S. degree in Business Administration and a M.S. degree in Marketing from Seoul National University. His research program looks at how perceptions of control affect consumer perception, behavior, and information processing. Specifically, he looks at how perceived control influences consumer multitasking behavior, physical and temporal distance perception, processing fluency effects, and time vs. money resource evaluations.

Sharlene He Northwestern University Sharlene He is a PhD Candidate in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on how consumers’ subjective interpretation of uncertainty affects information processing and brand perception. In one primary stream of research, her dissertation examines how different goals and mindsets shape what uncertainty signals to consumers, demonstrating when uncertainty can enhance or diminish consumers' desire for information. Her research also sheds light on a long-standing puzzle of whether the relationship between uncertainty and information seeking is linear versus curvilinear, identifying when each relationship can hold. In other work, she examines brand perception and preferences, in particular how the nature of consumers’ desire to reduce uncertainty alters preference for authenticity, as well as how consumer perceptions of firm power affects judgments of blame. Prior to the PhD program, Sharlene worked in management consulting on marketing and sales projects. She received her Masters degree in Economics from the University of Toronto and her Bachelor of Commerce degree from Queen’s University.


Ganga Urumutta Hewage University of Central Florida Ganga Hewage is a third year Doctoral student from University of Central Florida. Her research interests include experiential and material consumption, anthropomorphism and discrete emotions. Some of her current projects examine the antecedents and the consequences of experiential and material purchases/consumption. She has seven years of industry experience in product management with Unilever Sri Lanka. Prior to starting her PhD, she earned a MBA from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and B.Sc. with First Class Honors in Management and Information Technology from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Additionally, Ganga was awarded the “Chartered Marketer” status by Chartered Institute of Marketing UK for her achievements as a marketing practitioner.

Cony Ho University of Cincinnati Cony is originally from Taiwan. Before starting PhD program at UC, he finished undergraduate at National ChengChi University and master at University of Florida. Cony’s research program focuses largely on self-regulation and the importance of self-regulation for consumers’ goal pursuit. For instance, one manuscript (currently being prepped for submission to the Journal of Consumer Research) details the role of incidental perceptions of luck on goal commitment. In this project, six experiments demonstrate that consumers who feel unlucky disengage from goal pursuit, even goals in unrelated domains, as perceptions of bad luck decrease consumers’ motivation to allocate resources they believe will ultimately be ineffective for self-regulation. In conclusion, my research program aims to understand how consumers self-regulate their behaviors and how they achieve their goals. I have pursued these research questions with rigor and creativity. With the skills and experience I possess, I fully intend to continue this path and work on the area of self-regulation.

Lu Huang University of Connecticut Lu Huang is a doctoral student in marketing at University of Connecticut. Lu earned an M.S. from the University of Connecticut, an M.S. from Shandong University, and a B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China before entering the program. He also worked as an engineer in Samsung Electronics from 2007 to 2008. Currently, Lu works as a graduate assistant at the School of Business and his areas of specialization are empirical industrial organization, applied econometrics, dynamic structural models, and digital marketing. For example, one of his projects models online sellers’ exit decisions as the results of a dynamic learning process and finds a significant impact of the marketing tools on information acquisition to resolve demand uncertainty.


Yunhui Huang Hong Kong University of Science and Tech Yunhui Huang is fourth-year doctoral student. Her thesis research focuses on how infectious diseases related cues influence people's subsequent consumption behavior in unrelated domains. Within this stream, one of her projects investigates how the exposure to disease cues influences consumers’ preference for unconventional vs. common products. Another project examines the impact of disease cues on people’s (dis)like for anthropomorphized products. Yunhui is also interested in how consumers’ subjective states (e.g., envy and power) influence their behavior and decision-making. In one project, she studies how experiencing benign vs. malicious envy influences people’s self-control. In a second project, she examines the impact of how high vs. low power states on people’s reliance on feelings versus reasons in decision making. A final project in this stream examines how power states influence consumers’ preference for underdog versus top-dog brand biographies. Yunhui graduated from Sichuan University with a Bachelor of Science in Management Science. Prior to entering the Marketing Phd program in HKUST, she also studies in Fudan University as a graduate student

Subhash Jha University of Memphis Subhash Jha is a doctoral candidate at Fogelman College of Business and Economics, The University of Memphis. He is working on his dissertation where he is examining the role of haptic cues in service evaluation. He is expected to defend his dissertation by May 2018. Before joining the Ph.D. program in USA, he worked in India as an assistant professor of marketing at the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur (IIMU). He was a visiting researcher at The University of Wisconsin-Madison and The University of Memphis in the past. He earned his first Ph.D in Marketing from IBS-Hyderabad (India) in 2013. His overall research interest lies in examining the role of extrinsic and intrinsic cues in product and service evaluation. Among others, he has published in the Journal of Retailing, Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, Service Industries Journal, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, Services Marketing Quarterly and Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics.

Zhenling Jiang Washington University in St. Louis I am a fourth year doctoral student studying quantitative marketing at Washington University in St Louis. My current research interest includes consumer search, loyalty program and behavioral economics


Marcia Kwaramba Monash University My name is Marcia, I am a final year doctoral student at Monash University. My broad research interests are in the fields of Agricultural Marketing, Agricultural Development & Policy, Subsistence marketplaces, Macromarketing and Entrepreneurship. I have specific interests in research on entrepreneurial strategies of producers in subsistence contexts; social network mapping and examining market literacy of impoverished consumers and sellers. My current research project focuses on the market engagement behaviours of smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe.

Justin Lawrence University of Missouri Justin Lawrence is a 3rd year PhD candidate concentrating in marketing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he directed pricing strategy and operations for a Fortune 500 wholesaler based in the U.S. His research interests include the implementation of marketing strategy in interorganizational relationships and the roles of frontline employees in customer relationship management. Justin also enjoys skiing, biking, fishing, and spending time with his wife and their two daughters.

Mi Hyun Lee Arizona State University Mi Hyun Lee is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at Arizona State University (ASU). Her research explores the impact of new technology product and channel adoption on customer engagement by using an advanced statistical and econometric methodology. Before joining ASU, Mi Hyun worked as a senior researcher in Samsung Insurance Company in Seoul, South Korea. She also earned a PhD degree in Statistics at Virginia Tech.

Na Young Lee University of Tennessee Na Young is a doctoral candidate in the Marketing and Supply Chain Management program at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her main research interests focus on the influence of frontline employees and customer interface on customer experience. Her research has published in leading marketing journals including the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Marketing Letters. She has previous industry experience as a brand manager at renowned global companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Samsung SDI, and LEGO. She earned an MBA from the Vanderbilt University and received bachelor’s degree from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea.


Wenjing Li University of Kentucky Wenjing Li is a fourth year doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on behavioral aspect of pricing. She received her M.S in hospitality management from the University of Houston and B.S. in business administration from Huazhong Normal University.

Jonathan Lim University of California- Los Angeles I am a fourth-year PhD student at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. My interests are varied, pulling from topics such as causal reasoning and JDM to branding and linguistics. Currently, I am examining the question of what makes an explanation satisfying to consumers, and the influence this can have on their buying behavior (e.g., the influence of Amazon product reviews on consumer purchase). Additionally, in my second stream of research, I am looking at how dissociative outgroups can negatively influence consumers’ perceptions of new brands, even when these brands may lack negative connotations themselves. Along with research, I enjoy teaching marketing to students, having taught a Principles of Marketing course to undergraduates at Pepperdine University. Lastly, when I’m not doing these things, I enjoy: playing sports, watching Netflix, exercising, eating new foods, and exercising so I can eat new foods.

Aiqing Ling INSEAD Aiqing is a 4th year marketing student at INSEAD. He has been trained with background of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. His research interests lie in the understanding of how emotion influences consumers' judgments and evaluations. He applies interdisciplinary approaches of neurophysiological recordings (e.g. fMRI, skin conductance recording) and behavioural experiments to investigate his research questions. Aiqing is also interested in the emerging field of neuromarketing where academia and business practitioners actively work together to transfer marketing knowledge into better business models and consumer well beings.

Liu Liu New York University Liu Liu is a fourth year doctoral student in Marketing at Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University. Her advisors are Prof. Daria Dzyabura and Prof. Yuxin Chen. Her current research focuses on mining consumer and firm generated images to measure consumers’ brand perceptions, and to help firms communicate their brand positioning visually. The research employs computer vision, machine learning and deep learning methods to leverage the abundance and variety of unstructured data in social media. More broadly, she is interested in building quantitative methods that combine machine learning with economic and behavioral theories to better model and predict consumer behavior and guide firm decisions. Prior to joining the Stern Ph.D. program, she worked at Google for three years as a Software Engineer, doing large-scale machine learning for the AdSense system. She received


her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University and master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, both in Computer Science. In her free time, Liu Liu enjoys living spontaneously in New York City.

Shuya (Subrina) Lu Louisiana State University Shuya “Subrina” Lu is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Marketing at the E.J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University (LSU). She earned a B.B.A. in Management from China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) (CUG) in 2012 and a M.S. in Marketing from Clemson University in 2013. Her research area lies in digital marketing with empirical modeling. Her dissertation is about social media platform ecosystems, especially about the network effects of platform consumers and apps. In addition, she is working on online reviews projects as well. She presented her project “How Online Reviews Become Helpful: A Dynamic Perspective” at 2016 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference in Shanghai, China. She is also working on another online review project “Herd Behavior in Online Reviews”. Her teaching interests are Marketing Analytics, Marketing Research, Social Media/Internet Marketing, and Marketing Management.

Zoe (Yue) Lu University of Wisconsin- Madison Zoe Lu is a third-year doctoral student in marketing. While Zoe studies decision making in a variety of contexts (e.g., bundle pricing, promotion, prosocial behavior, etc.), she is especially interested in financial decision making. In particular, she has been studying how linking government incentive/subsidy type programs to one’s own money increases the effectiveness of the incentive. Zoe’s early research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science. Her more recent projects are under review in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research. She has presented her empirical work at conferences including the Association for Consumer Research and Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Zoe is currently a trainee reviewer for the Journal of Consumer Research and volunteer reviewer for the Association for Consumer Research and the Society for Consumer Psychology. She has been teaching Consumer Research and Analysis (CS 201) for the 2017 Spring semester. Zoe worked for China Unicom, the world’s fourth largest mobile service provider as a product manager before she joined the doctoral program in Wisconsin. She got her master’s degree in business administration and bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Shanghai, China.

Matthew Lunde University of Wyoming Matthew Lunde is a third year Marketing and Sustainable Business Practices PhD Candidate at the University of Wyoming. He has a background in marketing, management, architecture, and sustainability. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree with an emphasis in sustainable business and a Master of Architecture degree with an emphasis in sustainable design, both from North Dakota State University. Additionally, Matthew is a LEED-AP+BD&C under the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Matthew’s research uses mostly qualitative methods, focusing on sustainable marketing and management practices, social marketing and public policy concerns, business ethics, sustainable decision-making, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainable design. His


dissertation is currently focusing on sustainable decision-making, policy, and system concerns, using the context of tiny houses. Previously, he has worked three years as the Chair of Business and Accounting at Globe University, and he was an adjunct professor of architecture for four years at North Dakota State University.

Zecong Ma Binghamton University, the State University Zecong Ma is a Marketing PhD Candidate from The State University of New York at Binghamton. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Soochow University in China in 2010 and his master's degree in mathematical statistics from Binghamton University in 2013. After graduation from his master's program, he entered the marketing doctoral program at Binghamton's School of Management in 2013. In his doctoral study, Zecong’s primary research interests span from social network, marketing-finance interface, strategic alliance, to big data analytics. He has developed three major research papers, two of which are under final revision for submission. In his paper, "The impact of financial leverage on Marketing: an analysis of pricing and promotion decisions,” he investigates if and how financial pressure (i.e., leverage) influences manufactures’ marketing strategies and applies structural equation modeling and simulation to examine this marketing-finance interface issue. In another paper, "To follow or not to follow: the influence of geography and social networks on the success of crowdfunding,” he examines the differential impacts of social and geographic networks on online users’ funding decisions. Using a large set of crowdfunding data crawled from Kickstarter, he found that in some product categories, funders tend to deviate from other online users who are socially or geographically close to them, which challenges existing findings of neighborhood effect. In his third paper, Zecong applies machine learning technologies to analyze contextual and visual information (i.e., texts and videos) and investigates how various features extracted from advertisement influence consumer behavior. In addition to research, teaching gives Zecong an immense sense of accomplishment. It allows him to improve his own understanding of the subjects he teaches, as he always tries to explain concepts more clearly, efficiently and interestingly to students. Zecong has taught Marketing Research for two semesters and has received the Dean’s honor roll for Excellence in Teaching in Fall 2016.

Ana Martinovici Tilburg University I am a PhD Candidate in Marketing at Tilburg University, with a strong interest in Bayesian statistics and high quality research: reproducible, replicable, relevant, and communicated in a clear and responsible manner also to non-scientific audiences. My research focuses on the dynamic aspects of consumer decision making, more specifically on how preferences evolve over time until a final choice is expressed. In order to gain access to this latent processes, I am using dynamic Bayesian models calibrated on eye-tracking data, building on research in neuroeconomics that supports a strong link between attention and decision making. These models combine features of machine learning and multilevel latent growth and choice models to infer the build-up of preferences from changes in attention. The aim is to understand how consumers make decisions, and to be able to predict future choices before they are implemented. My teaching experience covers graduate level courses in modeling, marketing analytics, and experimental research methods, as well as supervising master theses. Before my PhD, I attained two Master of Science degrees in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics and in Marketing, both at Tilburg


University. Prior to academia I spent five years working in industry as a sales and strategy analyst.

Stefan Mayer Goethe University Frankfurt Stefan Mayer Goethe University Frankfurt Stefan is a doctoral candidate at the Marketing Department of Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on empirical aesthetics and product design. In his current work, he looks at (i) general principles of aesthetics and how they relate to consumer preferences and marketing outcomes and (ii) ways to algorithmically and objectively measure such design principles to integrate them into forecasting models. Next to his research, he teaches in the undergraduate and graduate program, including the Marketing Analytics track. Stefan received a Diploma in Psychology from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he studied Psychology and Computer Science. He has presented his research at several leading conferences, including ACR and EMAC conferences, and was honored with the Best Paper Award of the EMAC Research Camp in 2016.

Lauren Min University of Colorado- Boulder Lauren Min is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Marketing at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation explores curating—the process of selecting, managing, and presenting items. She investigates how curating influences consumer behavior and how people perceive curating consumers. For example, her research suggests that curating promotes prosocial choice when it is framed as nonconformist. She also finds that people expect curating consumers to behave more morally in the face of social pressure to perform immoral acts, but also more selfishly in pursuit of their preferences. In other research, she studies the psychological factors that influence extreme political attitudes, biased interpersonal attributions, and procrastination of emotionally difficult tasks. Lauren graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.

Shekhar Misra Indiana University Shekhar is a 4th year marketing doctoral student at Indiana University. His research interests include customer value creation, firm value capture, brand equity, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and firm performance, which he examines using econometric modelling methods. Shekhar’s research investigates the role of marketing in creating value for customers and capturing value for firms, as well as the effect of value creation and capture on firm performance. Conceptually, his research demonstrates the central role of marketing within firms, not merely as a value capture function, but also as a value creation function. The findings also reveal that value creation and value capture impact different elements of firm performance. On another research project, Shekhar examines the association between CSR, brand equity and firm performance. Preliminary findings reveal that CSR is an antecedent of brand equity, and that brand equity completely mediates the CSR–performance association. These findings suggest that CSR should be viewed as a dimension of brand equity, rather than an independent initiative. Shekhar has received his MBA in Marketing and also holds an engineering degree in Computer Science. Prior to joining the program at Indiana University, he served as a worldwide marketing manager with IBM Global Business Services.


Kimberley Mosher Queen’s University Kimberley is a PhD candidate at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. Her research focuses on the ways consumers benefit from engaging in activities that contribute to an imaginative experience of desired consumption experiences as well as brand strategy changes and how they affect consumer perceptions of the brand. In her dissertation, Kimberley focuses on consumers who recognize their desires as unattainable, yet still engage in imaginative mental experiences to explore their consumption desires. Her research suggests that even though consumers are not able to presently buy or experience what they desire, consumers still engage in various touchpoints associated with the consumer journey, with a specific focus on deriving value from their imaginative mental experiences. Consumers therefore can gain some benefits from these imaginative mental experiences even though they are not planning to or able to engage in actual consumption experiences at the present time. Prior to embarking on her PhD, Kimberley worked as an advertising account manager and a business consultant. Outside of research, Kimberley spends time sailing with her partner in the Thousand Islands of Lake Ontario, growing heirloom tomatoes and when time permits, reading for pleasure.

Guneet Kaur Nagpal University of North Carolina Guneet Kaur Nagpal is a third year PhD student at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the PhD program, she was working as a Manager, Innovation Practice Division at Nielsen BASES for 3.5 years. Guneet’s research interests include causal inference and mechanisms driving the causality; particularly as applied to problems arising from firms’ strategic decision making which render the observational associations between the variables of interest inadequate to unravel any causal pathways. In her first project, she studies the causal influence of information prominence on the consumer choice of big-ticket items – automobiles. In her second project, she seeks to understand the extent to which pharmaceutical firm's market power influences the launch prices of prescription drugs. The findings of the project feed to the topical debate on prescription drug pricing. In her third project, she investigates the evidence of herd behavior among brick and mortar retailers in adoption of internet. She also studies variation in propensity to herd with the extent of uncertainty in decision making.

Dionne Nickerson Georgia Institute of Technology I am a third-year PhD candidate at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology. My research interests include CSR/sustainability, luxury branding, and marketing strategy. I am currently investigating the impact of sustainability on brand equity. In a related project, I examine the effect of sustainability on consumer choice of luxury brands. My work has been presented at the 2017 Winter AMA Conference and at the LVMH-Singapore Management University Asian Luxury Branding Research Conference. Prior to joining the PhD program, I taught Principles of Marketing at Providence College and conducted research on mobile payment adoption in East Africa. I received my bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Brown University and my MBA from Providence College. After my undergraduate studies, I worked in technology consulting and taught English in France. When time permits, I enjoy traveling, cooking, and speaking French.


Eddie Ning University of California, Berkeley Eddie Ning is a third-year Ph.D. student in Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, his research interests include competitive strategy, salesforce management, bargaining, innovation, and customer relationship management. His current research looks at equilibrium in a sales process, during which buyer and seller engage in mutual learning of a product's fit, and while seller does not commit to a price. This project combines theoretical elements of search and bargaining to produce new insights into the dynamics of a sales process. He is also working on analytical models of dynamic salesforce compensation and competitive re-positioning. He received bachelor degrees in Economics and in Applied Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley. Prior to doctoral study, he worked at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Charles River Associates.

Luke Nowlan University of Miami Luke Nowlan is a doctoral candidate in the Marketing Department at the University of Miami, where he studies consumer behavior. His research explores various aspects of consumer creativity, including contextual factors that facilitate creative cognition, and the consequences of consuming products that are inherently creative. In addition to his work on creativity, Luke has done work in the area of judgment and decision making, with a specific interest on how attentional processes affect financial judgments. His work has been presented at the ACR, SCP, and SJDM conferences, as well as the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, and the Society for Neuroeconomics. Prior to joining the PhD program at UM, Luke studied economics, psychology, and business at Tulane University.

Moussa Obeid Wilfrid Laurier University Moussa Obeid is a doctoral candidate in Management (Marketing Discipline) in the Lazaridis School of Business & Economics, Waterloo, Canada. Moussa works under the advisement of Dr. Nicole Coviello and his research interests are in the areas of international marketing, marketing strategy and International Entrepreneurship with a special focus on young international ventures. In his dissertation, Moussa studies the relationship between the pace of internationalization of young international ventures and business performance. He looks at firm-level and individual-level drivers of internationalization pace and external factors that may affect the link between internationalization pace and performance. Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Moussa holds an MBA and a BBA from the American University of Beirut and has more than 12 years’ experience in senior managerial roles in international marketing and brand management in telecommunications and advertising industries.


Hanyong Park University of Texas at San Antonio Hanyong Park is a fourth-year doctoral student in Marketing at the University Texas at San Antonio. He received both his BS (industrial engineering) and MS (fashion merchandising) from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on scarcity-related consumer behaviors. His first dissertation essay examines how product unavailability influences consumers’ tendency to seek variety among provided options. His second dissertation essay examines how the salience of resource scarcity influences the way consumers use price information to judge product quality. Both of these essays are nearly complete, and the manuscripts are being revised for submission to Journal of Consumer Research. He also works on the influence of scarcity on other fundamental human processes, such as categorization. His dissertation committee members are Dr. Dengfeng Yan (co-chair, UTSA), Dr. Suman Basuroy (co-chair, UTSA), Dr. David Silvera (UTSA), and Dr. Ashok Lalwani (Indiana University). He has taught Principles of Marketing undergraduate elective course for three semesters, in which he received great teacher/course evaluation. He is currently serving as the ACR working papers review team.

Jane Jeongin Park University of Florida Jane Jeongin Park is a PhD candidate in Marketing at the University of Florida. Her research interests include judgment and decision making, social influences, goals and motivation, and similarity and comparison. Her dissertation focuses on how perceptions of one's own decision-making style impacts financial decision avoidance. In her other projects, she explores the influence of social connection and identification on motivation. She has presented her research at Society for Consumer Psychology and the University of Houston Doctoral Symposium. In 2017, Jane received honorable mention in the Society for Consumer Psychology's annual dissertation proposal competition. Before joining the PhD program, Jane earned her BA and MS in Marketing from Yonsei University in South Korea.

Michael Pimentel University of Alabama Michael is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Marketing at the University of Alabama where he works with his advisor Nikolaos Panagopoulos. Prior to Alabama, Michael gained professional selling, buying, and management experience working for Fortune 500 companies where he received numerous awards and recognitions for his sales accomplishments. Michael now leverages his professional experience with his academic training and curiosity to research solutions to problems facing organizations today. Currently, his active research projects lie in 1) identifying what sales organizations can do to drive measurable behavioral change, and quantifying the financial impact and potential trade-offs from such efforts, 2) using multi-source big data to understand the signals, drivers and evolutionary journeys of individuals who become the most productive salespeople and how firms can leverage this knowledge for greater financial performance, and 3) utilizing econometric models with longitudinal big data to understand the impact of sales force hiring, training, and incentive strategies. Michael’s work has been presented at major national marketing and sales conferences and is under review or in the process for submission at leading marketing journals. Michael plans to defend his dissertation proposal prior to interviewing at Summer AMA in San Francisco.


Harrison Pugh Florida State University Harrison has more than 10 years of sales and management experience in both the hospitality and technology industries. His research interests focus on frontline services and customer relationships. His current research examines the use of employee reprimands as a form of service recovery, lost customer requisition, and charitable giving using experimental methods as well as analysis of firm provided behavioral data. Harrison enjoys cooking and has experience as a professional sushi chef.

Hoori Rafieian Drexel University I am pursuing my PhD in Marketing at Drexel University. My research interests include consumer decision making, planning, and goal-setting. Specifically, I explore the ways through which consumers can make better decisions that potentially improve their health, happiness, and general well-being. My ongoing projects focus on consumers' perceptions of variety when they engage in acts of vice (e.g., indulging in unhealthy foods) and virtue (e.g., pro-social behavior).

Reza Rajabi University of Massachusetts Amherst Reza Rajabi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Reza completed his Bachelor degree in Industrial Engineering and Masters of Science in Socio-Economic System Engineering at Sharif University of Technology. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, Reza taught graduate courses in simulation while co-founding of one of the most successful online startups in Iran. Research interests include topics along the marketing-finance interface and marketing strategy of new ventures. Specifically, he focuses on marketing capabilities of startups and their performance in raising financial capital. Parallel interests lie in the overvaluation of startups prior to IPOs and the role of marketing strategies in such phenomenon. Further interest includes research on entrepreneurial selling in sales management area. Reza has collaborated with other researchers in areas such as big data and data analytics. He is also the sole instructor of Internet Marketing course at Isenberg School of Management. Since 2015, Reza has been a reviewer for the Journal of Marketing Intelligence & Planning where he won the Best Reviewer Award for 2016. Based on his entrepreneurial background, he serves as a mentor young entrepreneurs and a judge of pitch competitions in the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship.

Shelly Rathee University of Utah Shelly decided to pursue a PhD in Consumer Behavior after working in academic sector and obtaining industry experience in a number of roles including: merchandising, retail buying, and visual merchandising. Shelly’s research centers on magnitude perception, number cognition, letter cognition, pro-social behavior, categorization and consumer consumption.


Brandon Reich University of Oregon I am a 4th-year PhD student in the marketing program at University of Oregon. My undergraduate background is in Psychology (University of Florida, 2008) and I completed my MBA at SUNY Buffalo with a concentration in Marketing (2011). Within the field of consumer behavior, I am primarily interested in processes of consumer blame and attribution judgments in response to corporate behavior. I also study sustainability topics (e.g., demarketing, local food consumption, etc.). In addition, I have interests in psychometrics and scale development.

Maria Rodas University of Minnesota Maria A. Rodas is a PhD candidate who just completed her 4th year at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include consumer-brand relationships, cross-cultural consumer behavior, and charitably giving. Her research has been published in Journal of Consumer Psychology and featured in presentations at Association of Consumer Research, Society of Consumer Psychology, and American Marketing Association conferences. Her dissertations explores brand complexity—the extent to which a brand embodies multiple human traits and values—as a new construct and ways in which it can create stronger bonds with consumers and protect brands from failures. Prior to entering the PhD program, Maria received an MBA from Columbia University and spent a decade working in management consulting and in the consumer packaged goods industry. Her industry experience is mostly in brand management, having worked with brands such as Palmolive, Fruit Roll-Ups, Yoplait, Old El Paso, 5 Gum, Extra Gum, and Orbit Gum.

Alejandra Rodriguez Oklahoma State University Alejandra is a third year Consumer Behavior student at the Oklahoma State University Spears School of Business. Her research interests are centered on consumer welfare, by exploring ways in which consumers can use consumption to self-affirm. One of her current projects looks at why the act of using/consuming personally meaningful possessions and experiences can help individuals recover from threats to their self-concept. In another stream of research, she examines the long-term effects of satiation on the effectiveness of self-affirming consumption behaviors. Both of these projects will provide insights into how individuals can avoid maladaptive behaviors and use consumption as a proactive and adaptive coping strategy. Prior to entering the Spears PhD program, Alejandra received her MBA and BBA in Marketing from The University of Texas at El Paso.


Kevin Sample University of Georgia Kevin L. Sample is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate studying consumer behavior at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Specifically, he researches the influence of design (architectural, graphic, and product) and visual perception. His interest in these areas stems primarily from his prior experiences and his desire to help consumers and marketers find more sustainable, well-designed solutions. Before entering the program, Kevin worked as a licensed architect on a range of projects from residential and university housing to regional hospitals and academic buildings. While enjoying the practice of architecture, he believed he could do more for others by pursuing his Ph.D., becoming a researcher, and producing evidence-based research to help guide the design fields. Relatedly, his interests in helping others led to an exploration of how price perceptions of healthy food can negatively affect consumers. This research can be seen in the Journal of Consumer Research and has been highlighted in media outlets, including The Washington Post, CBS News, and Consumer Reports. When not researching or teaching, Kevin likes to spend time with his wife, kids, and their abundance of pets while trying to make a little bit of art here and there.

Anja Schanbacher University of London I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Marketing at London Business School, where I study consumer behavior. My main research interests lie in the areas of consumer financial decision-making, intertemporal decision-making, and self and identity. In my dissertation research I examine how and when future changes in income affect present discretionary spending, with a focus on the role of self-continuity. In another current project I investigate how receiving one’s pension in the form of an annuity as opposed to a lump sum can affect spending and health-related behavior. Prior to entering the doctoral program, I earned a Diplom (equivalent to Master’s degree) in Psychology from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. I also spent time as a student and research assistant in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for which I received a fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service.

Franklin Shaddy University of Chicago Franklin Shaddy is a fourth year doctoral student in behavioral marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is broadly interested in judgment and decision making, with an additional emphasis on goals and motivation. His dissertation—the first essay of which is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research—examines the psychological effects of bundling. Other current projects include understanding perceptions of fairness, when consumers make tradeoffs, and how exposure to price promotions can cause impatience. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, Franklin worked as a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He received his M.A. from Columbia University and B.B.A. from the University of Michigan.


Shervin Shahrokhi Tehrani University of Toronto Shervin Shahrokhi Tehrani is a fourth year Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He also has a doctoral degree at Mathematics from University of Toronto. His research focuses on theoretical and structural modeling in marketing. As a theorist, he is particularly interested in uncovering strategic issues in designing optimal retailing structures and firms’ advertising and price targeting strategies. He is deeply working on learning models, exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, and individual’s bounded rationality in a decision-making process under uncertainty by applying structural empirical frameworks. He proposes a new decision process to capture consumers’ choice behavior in a more pragmatic way in a multi-armed bandit process. Recently, he has started to investigate on social influence impacts on consumers’ attention, choice, and herding behaviors. His research is under review in leading marketing journals including Marketing Science. Shervin’s works have been presented at the ISMS Marketing Science, SICS, Frank M. Bass UTD FORMS, BIOMS conferences. He also interested in playing Chess and reading about History in his free time.

Ali Shamsollahi The University of Melbourne Ali is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the University of Melbourne with a focus on inter-organizational relationships, their evolution, and the nature of relationship repair. His dissertation, titled “relationship dynamics and repair processes”, comprises two manuscripts. His supervisors are Professor Simon Bell and Dr Danielle Chmielewski-Raimondo; his dissertation committee also includes Associate Professor Anish Nagpal. Besides his dissertation, Ali is working on two projects; one is “The Evolution of Buyer-Supplier Relationships” with his supervisors and Professor Jan Heide; the other is “What Plausible Values Can't Do” with Associate Professor Michael Zyphur, Professor Kristopher Preacher and Associate Professor Zhen Zhang. Before the Ph.D. program, Ali obtained an MBA from Azad University (Science and Research Branch). He also presented his conceptual framework at the 2016 AMA Winter Educators’ Conference and published an article in the Journal of Marketing Communication based on the findings of his MBA degree. Additionally, Ali has held different managerial roles in industry with the last one being the deputy CEO in a large consultancy firm in his hometown Tehran. Ali speaks English, Farsi, and has a limited working proficiency in French.

June Shi Carnegie Mellon University Zijun Shi is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Zijun’s focus areas include applied game theory and empirical study on consumer healthcare choices. Her recent studies explore the following three specific topics: (1) Optimal design of online reputation system. Her analysis specifies conditions under which maintaining some private information of products can actually improve social welfare and benefit the platform's reputation for quality. (2) How information credibility affects consumer healthcare choices. With the help of Econometric models and textual analysis, this study has important public policy and managerial implications on how to balance information credibility, publicity, and accessibility in order to improve consumer decision making in the healthcare domain. (3) Freemium strategy under network externalities. The analysis suggests that Freemium can be the optimal strategy only if the high- and low-end products provide asymmetric marginal network effects.


Yoonji Shim University of British Columbia Yoonji Shim is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Bachelor's degree in psychology and a Master's degree in social psychology, both from Seoul National University. Her research focuses on experiential versus material purchases, mortality salience, self-threats, and emotions. Currently, her dissertation research focuses on how thinking about one’s own death (mortality salience) influences consumer preferences for experiential versus material purchases using both lab experiments and field studies. She has presented her research at several conferences including the Association of Consumer Research, the Society for Consumer Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Hamid Shirdastian Concordia University Hamid Shirdastian is a PhD candidate of Business Administration (Marketing specialization) at the Concordia University, Canada. Hamid’s research focuses on examining the big data and its potential values to study consumer behavior and firm strategy. His current work explores predicting brand sentiments through social media to provide a reliable and valid instrument to evaluate the level of sentiments towards a brand more specifically and more accurately. This manuscript is currently under review in International Journal of Information Management. He is also working on location-based advertising and also on using social media contents to develop new product or service. His previous research focused on shopping channel preferences and cloud marketing adoption by the SMEs. His work has been presented in the Academy of Marketing Science conferences and published in the International Journal of Business Environment, among others. Hamid has also served as a reviewer for the Journal of Business Research, the American Marketing Association Conferences, and the Academy of Marketing Science annual conference. He holds an undergraduate degree in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, and MBA from Iran.

Sharmistha Sikdar Cornell University Sharmistha Sikdar’s research interests lie in the development and application of statistical models to understand customer behavior, specifically in the context of customer relationship management and customer valuation. On the substantive side, her research interests are in omni-channel and brand marketing. Her current research focuses on developing a model to examine customer engagement dynamics on the multiple channels of firms. Sharmistha has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics with honors from University of Calcutta and an MSc degree in Quantitative Economics from Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. She has over 8 years of industry experience with companies such as General Electric, Citibank and Infosys, specializing in banking and customer analytics. She is also a co-inventor of a customer analytics solution for enterprises (patent no. US20110251874 A1).


Tracey Swartz University of South Carolina Tracey Swartz is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests are in understanding the influence of chief marketing officers (CMOs) on marketing performance. She is also interested in product quality and social media marketing. Her research is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing. Her research was recognized as best paper in the ‘Business to Business and Inter-Organizational Issues in Marketing’ track (AMA Summer 2015). Her research was awarded the William O. Bearden Doctoral Student Research Award (Southeast Marketing Symposium 2016). Her research was selected as Best Overall Conference Paper and best paper in the ‘Marketing Strategy, Innovation, and New Products’ track (AMA Summer 2016). She has received funding from the Center for Executive Succession and SPARC program at USC. She was awarded the 2016 Moore School of Business Doctoral Student Association Promising Researcher Award. Prior to joining the doctoral program, Tracey led the University of South Florida’s (USF) technology incubator and Florida High Tech Corridor Matching Grants Program. In this role, she served as Principal Investigator on a $1 million grant from the US Department of Commerce. Tracey holds a B.S. in business and M.S. degrees in finance and marketing and an MBA from USF.

Jaclyn Tanenbaum Florida International University I earned a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Business and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Central Florida. Currently, I am a Doctoral Candidate at Florida International University (FIU). Prior to starting my PhD. at FIU, I designed marketing plans and strategies for clients in a variety of industries; some of which include Travel, Tourism & Hospitality, Casino Gaming, Health & Beauty, and Fashion & Retail. While I was the Market Research Manager for a major cruise line, I developed brand, advertising, product development, distribution channel, and employee research studies. Findings were used to shape the cruise line’s brand positioning and messaging, marketing strategy, and product offerings. Then, three years ago, I left industry to become a full-time doctoral student. During this time, I have become passionate about using my research skills for a new purpose. I am excited about approaching my research from a more academic perspective and learning how to develop and validate theory in a series of programmatic research streams. Currently, I am researching in the health-related consumer behavior and luxury goods consumption domains. I look forward to sharing my work in top-level journals and inspiring other like-minded marketing academics and professionals.

Lez Trujillo Torres University of Illinois at Chicago Lez Trujillo Torres is a third year student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her theoretical interests include theories of value and institutional theory through a social-cultural lens. Under the direction of Benét DeBerry-Spence, Ph.D., her dissertation examines the dynamic nature of value and the implications of this for health consumption in the context of oncological services. She is also interested in the intersection of marketing and public policy, biomedical and patient-centered innovations, and technological influences on charitable giving. These efforts are complemented by her experience as a practitioner working on U.S. social justice issues. She has an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology (Neurobiology).


Kalinda Ukanwa University of Maryland Kalinda Ukanwa is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Prior to that, Kalinda was an industrial engineer, financial analyst, and executive at digital, entertainment, and leisure firms such as Walt Disney, Citigroup, Viacom, and Kaplan. Her research interests are in developing quantitative marketing models to provide insight into how reputation, advantage, and other sociological processes impact marketing and service outcomes. Kalinda has published an article in the American Journal of Sociology. Kalinda is a recipient of the University of Maryland Graduate School University Fellowship and of the American Marketing Association Valuing Diversity Scholarship. Kalinda has a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering as well as an MBA. All three degrees are from Stanford University.

Yasamin Vahdati Oklahoma State University I am a second year Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University. My research interests are broadly in the areas of corporate activism and corporate social responsibility. My current research project focuses on the role of cause controversy as perceived by customers in formation of customer’s attitude toward a cause-brand alliance. I examine the interaction effect of brand ally, cause ally, and cause controversy as perceived by customers, on customer’s attitude toward a cause-brand alliance and their identification with the focal brand. The findings of my research highlight the important role of perceived cause controversy in the design of cause-brand alliances and provide academics and managers with enhanced understanding of alliances involving cause controversy and methods to deploy them as a basis for meaningful differentiation.

Veronica Valli University of Mannheim Veronica Valli is 4th year PhD student in Marketing at the University of Mannheim. She was born in Bologna, Italy and holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Marketing and a Master's degree in Statistics, Economics and Business, both acquired at the University of Bologna. Veronica's research interests are in Consumer Behaviour and primarily focused on intertemporal choice, framing effects and post-purchase consumption behaviour.


Francesca Valsesia University of Southern California Francesca Valsesia is a fourth year doctoral student at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Her research interests focus impression management, social influence, word-of-mouth and the social drivers of consumer behavior more broadly. In her dissertation, she investigates various self-presentation tactics that consumers employ while trying to make a good impression on others, with a particular emphasis on tactics that have emerged with the advent of social media. More specifically, she explores how communication on social media platforms facilitates audience partitioning and how this is used to pursue impression management goals (e.g., choosing to address a specific audience member when attempting to impress a broader audience). Her dissertation work won her the 2017 SCP Best Dissertation Award. A related stream of research investigates the social factors that drive consumer ratings in public online review platforms such as Yelp! and TripAdvisor. Her research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Francesca holds a bachelor degree in Economics and Management from Bocconi University and master’s degree in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics. Prior joining USC, Francesca worked at Nielsen in Milan.

Luciana Velloso York University Luciana Velloso is a PhD candidate in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University. Her research interests include market system dynamics, crisis management, global branding, and consumer culture theory. Her dissertation research combines quantitative and qualitative methods to shed light on consumers’ contribution to the institutional dynamics that influence brand reputation recovery following corporate malfeasance. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, and has been presented at the annual conferences of the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium, Strategic Management Society, Academy of International Business, and European International Business Academy. Luciana holds an MBA in Marketing and International Business and a bachelor’s degree in Communications, both from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. As an MBA exchange student, she was awarded the certificate of advanced studies from Thunderbird School of Global Management, ASU. Since 2009, she has taught at the undergraduate and Executive MBA levels, including Marketing Management, Marketing Research, Integrated Marketing Communications, and Business Plan. She has also served as executive coordinator for Research and for different Executive MBA and extension programs at the COPPEAD Graduate School of Business, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her industry experience involves consulting, and researcher positions in sponsored projects.

Daniel Villanova Virginia Tech Daniel Villanova is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Marketing at the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. Daniel earned his BSBA from Appalachian State University in 2013, where he double-majored in Marketing and Management. His research falls into two main research streams. First, Daniel explores how individuals intuitively respond to quantitative information- the distributional features they use to assess product ratings, the ways they compute price rates to assess bulk offers, and their interpretations of percentages. Second, he studies consumer inferences stemming from others’ behaviors- judgments about an expert’s prediction-making


process from the level of explanatory detail provided with a prediction, and judgments about brand users from their conspicuous product usage.

Dian Wang Texas A&M University Dian Wang is a fourth year doctoral student in Marketing at Mays Business School of Texas A&M University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree of Business Administration in Marketing from Texas Tech University, and a Master’s degree of in business (concentrating in Marketing) from The University of Texas at Arlington. Dian’s research focuses on the area of Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT) and creativity. A main stream of his research, Dian’s dissertation essays explore the effects of economic implements (i.e., framing of financial incentives) and psychological factors (i.e., power distance belief and scarcity mindset) on creativity. Pricing is another important domain of Dian’s behavioral research, in which he studies the interplay between behavioral pricing and culture on individuals’ fairness perception. He also investigates people’s behavioral anomalies when making decisions for others. Dian Wang uses traditional experimental methods supplemented with biometric feedback, such as emotion assessment via facial expression analysis, to investigate these research questions. An enthusiastic teacher, Dian has taught an undergraduate level Consumer Behavior course at the Mays Business School and received a 4.82/5.00 teaching effectiveness rating. He goes out of his way to create interest and excitement about marketing for his undergraduates.

Feng (Joyce) Wang Michigan State University Joyce (Feng) Wang is a fourth year doctoral candidate in marketing at Michigan State University. Her research interests include customer strategy, relationship marketing, and innovation. Currently, Joyce is focusing on her dissertation topic, which is examining how firms should evaluate customer trajectories as they migrate from other brands and between intra-brand segments. Another area of interest for her dissertation is how to map the online customer journey characterized by clickstream and evolvement. She is also interested in, and has published on, the topics of innovation, and Joyce is continuously working on an empirical examination of how environmental munificence contextualizes the impact of open innovation. In addition, Joyce is also interested in social media research. Particularly, she is currently working on how a product’s aesthetic design, measured by a recently developed morphing technique, drives consumer word of mouth regarding virality, sentiment, and brand passion. She is also examining how types of emotion expressed in consumer word of mouth influence brand performance. In addition to her research, Joyce has taught courses in quantitative business research methods, marketing strategy, and was invited as course consultant for data mining in the MSU master of market research program.


Peng Wang University of Arizona Peng Wang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Marketing at the University of Arizona, with a minor in Economic Theory. He also holds a master degree in business management and a bachelor degree in marketing, both from Nankai University, China. Peng is interested in applying tools such as game theory and econometrics to understand marketing phenomena and solve marketing relevant problems. Peng’s work mostly lie in the field of marketing modeling, covering both analytical and structural empirical approaches. The substantive topics he works on include sports marketing, platform business, and digital piracy. Currently, Peng is focusing on his dissertation research that examines the dynamics of investor behavior and business decision in the context of online crowdfunding. The goal is to 1) derive testable model-based implications that can inspire further empirical work, and 2) develop better mechanism to enhance funding efficiency and social welfare.

Jared Watson University of Maryland Jared Watson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland. He entered academia after spending a few years in industry, which has allowed him to identify relevant marketing problems, and address those problems with theory-driven approaches. Jared has several working papers that investigate the influences of online reviews, and their various attributes, on consumer judgments and decision-making. For example, one paper explores the relationship between product ratings and the number of reviews from a numerical cognition and diagnosticity framework, while another project explores how consumers respond to the knowledge of fraudulent reviews using a trustworthiness framework. Because of the information asymmetry online versus offline, he is particularly interested in how information readily-available online effects consumer behaviors. To that end, he would classify his research interests as exploration of the digital influences of consumer judgments and decision-making.

Juliana White Louisiana State University Juliana White is a third year doctoral student in the Department of Marketing at the E.J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University (LSU). She graduated from Florida A&M University in 2012 with a B.S. in Business Administration, and then earned her M.S. in Marketing from the University of South Florida in 2014. Juliana is a current member of the PhD Project’s Marketing Doctoral Student Association. Her research interests include sales strategy and relationship marketing. Her work has been presented at the National Conference in Sales Management, the Global Sales Science Institute Conference, and the Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference. Juliana’s dissertation examines dyadic customer-salesperson relationships using hierarchical linear modeling.


Sarah Whitley Boston University Sarah Whitley’s research interests are in the area of decision making, with a focus on how utilitarian and hedonic motivations influence prosocial behavior and choice. Within this domain, her current work explores how hedonic and utilitarian motivations influence consumer search effort and sustainable consumption decisions. Sarah Whitley is currently a PhD student in Marketing at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University. Prior to her PhD, she worked as an Analyst in the Energy/Electric Power industry for economic consulting firm The Brattle Group. She received a BS in Economics in 2009 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Zuhui Xiao University of Minnesota Zuhui Xiao is a doctoral candidate in quantitative marketing at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Her research interests focus on behavioral modeling in pricing, sales force incentives and competitive strategies. Particularly, she uses a mix of analytical models, laboratory experiments and observational data to study non-standard preferences that drive otherwise puzzling marketplace behaviors. Her dissertation work investigates the origin of class prices, a seemingly-inefficient practice where prices are not fully responsive to costs or demands. Driven by extensive use of this practice, Zuhui derives a more realistic view of consumer valuation process that rationalizes both firm's optimal pricing decisions and consumers' purchase decisions, enabling her to provide a new explanation to class prices. In her another project, she examines the origin of trust, where she identifies several inter-related elements to account for the beneficial effects of trust. Zuhui is also studying cognitive hierarchy effects in inter-firm competition, and the marginality and identities of salespeople. Prior to the Ph.D. program, Zuhui received a B.S. in Management Science from Fudan University, China, and also earns a M.Phil in Operation Management from Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Lidan Xu University of Illinois Lidan Xu is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her primary research interest centers around consumer creativity, particularly the social implications of creative cognition. In her dissertation, she examines the downstream consequences of engaging in creative tasks. Specifically, she explores how engaging in creative tasks can impact donation behavior. Her research has been presented at major conferences, such as Association for Consumer Research and Society for Consumer Psychology. Prior to joining the doctoral program, Lidan received B.S. in Business Management from Brigham Young University. In her spare time, Lidan enjoys traveling and working out.


Ning Ye Temple University Ning Ye is a doctoral student in Marketing at Temple University. She is a member of Consumer Sensory Innovation Lab directed by Dr. Maureen Morrin. She also works as both a research assistant and a teaching assistant at Temple University. Her research interests include sensory marketing, food psychology, placebo effects and product efficacy.

Kelly Yoon University of California- Irvine Eun Jung Yoon is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Marketing area of the Paul Merage School of Business. Prior to entering the doctoral program, she earned a M.S. in Information Systems at University of Florida and a B.A. Business Administration at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. Her dissertation research investigates the effects of online self-disclosure on personal health goal attainment. She won the best research poster award in the Paul Merage School of Business Annual Research Festival, the Ray Watson 2016 Fellowship, a travel scholarship from a major conference in her research area.

Yanfen You University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee Yanfen You is a doctoral candidate in Marketing, Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interests focused on consumer behavior, specifically, consumer identity (i.e., prosocial identity and gender identity), emotion (i.e., gratitude and indebtedness), gift giving, and product anthropomorphism. She has published in Journal of Internet Commerce, Int. J. Electronic Marketing and Retailing, and Management World (Chinese).

Jungju Yu Yale Jungju Yu is a PhD candidate in quantitative marketing at Yale School of Management. He is an analytical modeler whose current research focuses on branding, reputation, and on-line advertising. As part of his dissertation, he studies whether a firm should brand its products together (a branded house), or separately (a house of brands). He considers two-dimensional relation between its products on supply- and demand-side to characterize conditions under which the firm prefers a branded house. In another paper, he has worked on collective brand in which independent firms share a common brand. He shows that, despite the free-riding incentives on other firm’s effort, a collective brand can provide commitment power to its members. The benefit can be large enough that a firm wants to form a collective brand even with a low-quality firm.


Daniel Zane The Ohio State University Danny Zane is a fourth year doctoral candidate in Marketing at The Ohio State University. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from The College of New Jersey and previously worked as a Marketing Analyst for Harte-Hanks. Danny’s research interests include inference making, consumer lay theories, self-perceptions, and social influence. His work in the Journal of Consumer Psychology explores how social influence and self-perceptions affect consumers within the domain of ethicality. Danny’s ongoing projects explore how these theoretical variables influence consumers in domains such as advertising and online behavior.

Xianfang Zeng University of Calgary Xianfang Zeng is a PhD candidate at the Haskayne School of Business. Her main research line centers on the dynamics of customer-firm and customer-customer relationships. In particular, she currently explores psychological mechanisms underlying customer engagement. In her minor research line, she investigates how customers interpret their relationships with firms in the prosocial context. She presented her research at the AMA summer and winter conferences. Aside from her research, she loves teaching marketing-related courses. In her spare time, she enjoys music, reading, swimming, and jogging.

Wanqing Zhang Purdue University I am currently a PHD candidate at the Krannert School of Purdue University. I received my Bachelors and Mphil degrees in Business Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My primary research interests include quantitative modeling, field experiments, the introduction and adoption of new products, B2B markets, CRM, WOM and green marketing. I am a winner of 2016 ISBM (Institute for the Study of Business Markets) Dissertation Competition.

Yifan Zhang Pennsylvania State University Yifan Zhang is a third-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Smeal College of Business, Penn State. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he received Bachelor degrees in Mathematics and Linguistics from Zhejiang University in China. His research interests lie in two domains: online marketing and market segmentation. For research in the first domain, working with Dr. Arvind Rangaswamy, he is studying the evolution of consumers’ consideration process using online clickstream data and is developing new recommender agents to elicit preference from impatient online consumers. For research in the second domain, working Dr. Duncan Fong, he is developing scalable and robust segmentation models for Big Data related applications. He is also involved in joint research with scholars from other business disciplines. For example, in joint work with Dr. Kai Du and Dr. Steven Huddart from Accounting, he is developing new measures of accounting information systems based on a non-homogenous hidden Markov model to predict financial misreporting and accruals quality.


Ning Zhong Emory University Substantive: Social Media Dynamics, Customer Relationship Management Methodological: Bayesian Methods, Topic Models, Natural Language Processing"


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