Ayelet Gneezy

Industry Areas

Consumer Goods
Services
Non-profit

Gneezy’s research addresses a wide variety of questions pertaining to consumer behavior such as behavioral pricing, prosocial behavior (with a focus on green/sustainable behavior), social preferences (e.g., promise accounting, negative reciprocity, fairness), and factors affecting individuals’ quality of life (e.g. nutrition & exercise, poverty). In her research, Gneezy collaborates with small (a Temecula base winery) and large (e.g. Disney) firms and integrates field experiments to test her predictions in “the wild”. Recently, professor Gneezy started collaborating with organizations and researchers interested in questions that address the many challenges facing our society such as poverty, hunger, and health.

Her research has been published in a number of leading academic journals, including Science, PNAS, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Consumer Research, and has been covered in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Scientific American, and the Atlantic.

Gneezy received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, immediately after which she joined the Rady School of Management at UCSD. Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., Gneezy earned an MBA in the Netherlands, and then returned to Israel to manage the strategic planning department in DataPro Proximity (a subsidiary of BBDO Worldwide).

Papers

Jung, M., Nelson, L.D., Gneezy, U., and Gneezy, A. (forthcoming). Signaling Virtue: Charitable Behavior under Consumer Elective Pricing, Marketing Science.

Gneezy, A. (forthcoming). Field Experimentation in Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing Research.

Nosal, A., Keenan, E., Hastings, P., and Gneezy, A (forthcoming). The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers'' Perceptions of Sharks, Plos One.

Gupta, S., Miller, S., Koch, M., Berry, E., Anderson, P., Pruitt, S., Borton, E., Hughes, A., Carter, E., Hernandez, S., Cruz, H., Halm, E., Gneezy, A., Lieberman, A., Sugg-Skinner, S., Argenbright, K., Balasubramanian, B. (forthcoming). Financial Incentives for Promoting Colorectal Cancer Screening: A Randomized, Comparative Effectiveness Trial, American
Journal of Gastroenterology.

Reddy, S., Montambault, J., Masuda, Y., Butler, W., Fisher, J., Keenan, E., and Gneezy, A. (forthcoming). Advancing Conservation by Understanding and Influencing Human Behavior, Conservation Letters. Gneezy, U., Keenan, E. and Gneezy,

Gneezy, U., Keenan, E. and Gneezy, A. (2014). Avoiding the Overhead Aversion in Charity, Science, 346, 632-635 (DOI:10.1126/science.1253932)

Jung, M., Nelson, L.D., Gneezy, A., and Gneezy U. (2014). Paying More When Paying for Others: Consumer Elective Pricing with Pay-It-Forward Framing, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(3), 414-431.

Gneezy, A. and Epley, N. (2014). Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(17), 491-499.

Gneezy, A., Gneezy, U., and Lauga D. O. (2014). A Reference-Dependent Model of the Price–Quality Heuristic, Journal of Marketing Research, 51 (2), 153-164.

Baca-Motes, K., Brown, A., Gneezy, A. Keenan, E. and Nelson, L. D. (2013). Commitment and Behavior Change: Evidence from the Field. Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 1070-1084.

Gneezy, A., Gneezy, U., Riener, G., & Nelson, L. D. (2012). Pay-What-You-Want, Identity, and Self-Signaling, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(19): 7236–7240.

Gneezy, A., Imas, A., Nelson, L. D., Brown, A., and Norton, M. I. (2012). Paying to be Nice: Costly Prosocial Behavior and Consistency, Management Science, 58:179-187. * Special issue on Behavioral Economics.
Online Appendix

Gneezy, A. and Fessler D.T. (2012). Conflict, sticks and carrots: war increases prosocial punishments and rewards . Proceedings of the Royal Society B., 279, 219-223.

Gneezy, A., Gneezy, U., Nelson, L. D. and Brown, A. (2010). Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving. Science, 329 (5989), 325-327.
Winner of the 2012 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Robert B. Cialdini Award for excellence in a published field study.

Shu, S. and Gneezy, A. (2010). Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences, Journal of Marketing Research. 47(5), 933-944.

Media Coverage

Avoiding Overhead Aversion in Charity
Wall Street Journal (December 15,2014)
Certified Fundraising Executive

Overhead Paper Media
Huffington Post (January 20, 2015)

Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises, 
Business Week (May 23, 2014)
The Muse (May 18, 2014)
Boston Globe (May 18, 2014)
Business Week (May 23, 2014)
Time.com (June 2, 2014)
The Atlantic (August 27, 2014)
The Daily Mail (September 11, 2014)

Pay-What-You-Want, Identity, and Self-Signaling in Markets
Discover (July 15, 2010)
Huffington Post (April 23, 2012)
Scientific American (April 25, 2012)
The Boston Globe (December 25, 2012)
Washington Post (July 14, 2013)
NBC (August 3, 2013)
The New Yorker (February 7, 2014)
USA Today (April 17, 2014)
The New York Times (August 17, 2015)
New York Magazine (December 30, 2015)

Paying to be Nice: Costly Prosocial Behavior and Consistency
The New York Times (August 16, 2013)

Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving
The New Yorker (February 7, 2014)
The Marker (May 21, 2009; in Hebrew)
Freakonomics (July 20, 2010)
BBC (January 21, 2014)
UT San Diego (August 2 2013)
Financial Times (August 16, 2013)

Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences
The Medium (November 17, 2015)
The New York Times (December 28, 2009)
The Atlantic (May 1, 2009)
Boston Globe (June 20, 2010)
Financial Times (January 3, 2014)
Calcalist (November 11, 2010; in Hebrew)

The Framing of Financial Windfalls and Implications for Public Policy
The New Yorker (January 26, 2009)
Forbes (April 27, 2015)

Working Papers

Jung, M., Nelson, L.D., Gneezy, A., and Gneezy U., “Signaling Virtue: Charitable Behavior under Consumer Elective Pricing” (revision invited, Marketing Science)

Gneezy, A. Imas, A. and Ariely, D., “Sweet revenge: Hurting Others to Feel Good “ (under revision, JEP: Applied)

Gneezy A., “Field Experimentation in Marketing Research” (invited by the Journal of Marketing Research)

Shifting Mindset in Consumer Elective Pricing (w/ Saccardo, S., Samek, A., Lee, C., Jung, M., Leif. D. Nelson)

Spillover of placebo effects (w/U. Gneezy and E. Yoeli).

Driving Pro-Environmental Choice (w/ E. Keenan, E. and O. Amir)

Are thin people healthy? The representativeness heuristic in health risk assessments (w/J. Schwartz and J. Outlaw)

To tip or not to tip: emotional and monetary tradeoffs in tipping (w/N. Mazar).

Testing the role of price information: Motivating or informative? (w/H. Plassmann and B. Shiv).

Through a prosocial lens: Ought and want motivations in prosocial behavior (w/E. Keenan and C. Zhong).

Additional Works

Intuition Can’t Be Beat (Rady Business Journal — Summer 2011)