Yale School of Management - Faculty

George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing & Director of the Center for Customer Insights

Ravi Dhar is the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. He also has an affiliated appointment as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology, Yale University.

He is an expert in consumer behavior and branding, marketing management, and marketing strategy and a leader in bringing psychological insights to the study of consumer decision-making. His research focuses on using psychological principles, such as limited self-control and ability to process information, to investigate fundamental aspects about the formation of consumer preferences in order to understand consumer behavior in the marketplace. Over the years, he has addressed questions such as the following: how do consumers choose as the number of options multiply? How do people make tradeoffs between what’s fun and what’s practical? Can engaging in a selfless act lead to more selfish choices? Does making an initial purchase have an impact on their willingness to spend on additional purchase? His other research focuses on understanding consumer motivation to pursue their goals in various situations as well managing the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. In real-life situations, people hold several different, even conflicting goals that they intend to accomplish and his research explores the regulation of multiple goals in multiple goal systems. His work has been mentioned in Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, USA Today, and other popular media.

He has been a visiting professor at HEC Graduate School of Management in Paris, at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and at the Business Schools at Stanford and New York University. In addition, he has consulted to companies in a wide variety of industries, including financial services, high tech, and luxury goods.

He has published more than 50 articles and has received several awards for his research. He also serves or has served on the editorial boards of leading marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. He has led seminars on various marketing topics for senior executives in Asia, Europe, and North and South America.

Consultancies
IBM
Lucent Technologies
MFI UK
Pepsico
Praxair
Procter & Gamble
Visa
General Mills
Expert witness and consultant in legal cases

Achievements and Awards
Yale SOM Alumni Association Teaching Award, 2012
Finalist, William O'Dell Award, 2012
Finalist, William O'Dell Award, 2008
Winner, William O'Dell Award, 2005
Finalist, Paul Green Award, 2004
Finalist, William O'Dell Award, 2004
INFORMS Consortium Faculty Fellow
AMA Consortium Faculty Fellow
John A. Howard AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award, 1992-1993 (Honorable Mention)
AMA Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 1991

Editorships
Editorial Board:
Journal of Consumer Psychology
Journal of Marketing
Journal of Marketing Research (Associate Editor)
Marketing Letters
Marketing Science (Past Associate Editor)
Journal of Consumer Research (Past Associate Editor)

Books
Marketing Management (with R.S. Winer), Pearson Hall, 2010

Selected Articles

"Mental Representation and Assortment Size: How Abstract Thinking Helps Choice from Large Assortments" (with J. Xu and Z. Jiang), Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming

"The Role of Mental Representation in Choice Difficulty” (with U. Khan and E. Kim), Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming

"Adding Small Differences Can Increase Similarity and Choice" (with J. Kim and N. Novemsky), Psychological Science, forthcoming

"When Guilt Begets Pleasure: The Positive Effect of a Negative Emotion” (with K. Goldsmith and E. Kim), Journal of Marketing Research, 2012

"Bridging the Gap Between Joint and Individual Decisions: Deconstructing Preferences in Relationships” (with M. Gorlin), Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012

"The Importance of the Context in Brand Extension: How Pictures and Comparisons Shift Consumers’ Focus from Fit to Quality,” (with T. Meyvis and K. Goldsmith), Journal of Marketing Research, 2012

"Self-Signaling and the Costs and Benefits of Temptation in Consumer Choice" (with K. Wertenbroch), Journal of Marketing Research, 2012

"Price Framing Effects on Purchase of Hedonic and Utilitarian Bundles," (with U. Khan), Journal of Marketing Research, 2010

"Making Products Feel Special: When Metacognitive Difficulty Enhances Evaluation," (with A. Pocheptsova and A. Labroo), Journal of Marketing Research, 2010

"Modeling the Under Reporting Bias in Panel Survey Data" (with S. Yang and Y. Zhao), Marketing Science, 2010

"The Effect of Decision Order on Purchase Quantity Decisions" (with I. Simonson and S.M. Nowlis), Journal of Marketing Research, 2010

"Tradeoffs and Depletion in Choice" (with N. Novemsky, J. Wang, and R. Baumeister), Journal of Marketing Research, 2010

"Opportunity Cost Neglect" (with S. Frederick, N. Novemsky, J. Wang, and S. Nowlis), Journal of Consumer Research, 2009

"Anticipating Adaptation to Products" (with J. Wang and N. Novemsky), Journal of Consumer Research, 2009

"Deciding Without Resources: Psychological Depletion and Choice in Context" (with O. Amir, A. Pochepstova, and R. Baumeister), Journal of Marketing Research, 2009

"Customization Procedures and Customer Preferences" (with A. Valenzuela and F. Zettelmeyer), Journal of Marketing Research, 2009

"Beyond Rationality: The Content of Preferences," (with N. Novemsky), Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2008

"Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming of Perceptual Features and Brand Evaluation" (with A. Labroo and N. Schwarz), Journal of Consumer Research, 2008

"When Thinking Beats Doing: The Role of Optimistic Expectations in Goal-Based Choice," (with Y. Zhang and A. Fishbach), Journal of Consumer Research, 2007

"Seeing The Forest Or The Trees: Implications of Construal Level Theory for Consumer Choice" (with E. Kim), Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2007

"Where There Is a Way, Is There a Will? The Effect of Future Choices on Self-Control" (with U. Khan), Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2007

"Preference Fluency in Choice" (with N. Novemsky, N. Schwarz, and I. Simonson), Journal of Marketing Research, 2007

"The Shopping Momentum Effect" (with J. Huber and U. Khan), Journal of Marketing Research, 2007

"Institutional Perspectives on Real Estate Investing" (with W. Goetzmann), The Journal of Portfolio Management, 2006

"Are Rheumatologists' Treatment Decisions Influenced by Patients Age?" (with L. Fraenkel and N. Rabidou), Rheumatology, 2006

"Subgoals as Substitutes or Complements: The Role of Goal Accessibility" (with A. Fishbach and Y. Zhang), Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 2006

"Up Close and Personal: A Cross Sectional Study of the Disposition Effect" (with N. Zhu), Management Science, 2006

"Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice" (with U. Khan), Journal of Marketing Research, 2006

"The Effects of Goal Fulfillment on Risk Preferences in Sequential Choice" (with N. Novemsky), Journal of Consumer Research, 2005

"Goals As Excuses or Guides: The Liberating Effect of Perceived Goal Progress on Choice" (with A. Fishbach), Journal of Consumer Research, 2005

Managerial Summary of Recent Research
"Making the Price of Indulgence Right" (with U. Khan), Sloan Management Review, March 30, 2011

"Column: The Persuasive Power of Opportunity Costs" by Shane Frederick, Harvard Business Review, January - February, 2011

"The Power of Customers’ Mindset" (with K. Goldsmith and J. Xu), Sloan Management Review, October 1, 2010

"Giving Consumers License to Enjoy Luxury" (with U. Khan and S. Schmidt), Sloan Management Review, April 1, 2010

"A Mind for Brand Extensions" by By Larry Yu, Sloan Management Review, July 1, 2008

Education
PhD University of California, Berkeley, 1992
MS University of California, Berkeley, 1990
MBA Indian Institute of Management, 1987
B.Tech. Indian Institute of Technology, 1986