Klaus Wertenbroch

Klaus Wertenbroch is the Novartis Chaired Professor of Management and the Environment and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. He directs the INSEAD Strategic Marketing Programme.

Trained at the University of Chicago’s influential Center for Decision Research, Dr. Wertenbroch is an expert in behavioural economics and consumer decision-making, strategic brand management, and pricing. He has taught these topics in undergraduate, MBA, Ph.D., and executive education programmes in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and has worked with clients including Allianz, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cemex, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Ferrero, GfK, IBM, Indian Railways, Lafarge, LG, L'Oreal, Mediamarkt/Saturn, Metro, Nissan, Petronas, Philip Morris, Starwood Hotels, and Unilever.

His research focuses on behavioural economics and its strategic marketing and public policy implications. He is an expert on consumer self-control problems, with a focus on overconsumption, overspending, and consumer debt, and has contributed to financial education initiatives by the public and the private sector (e.g., Citigroup, Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, German Institute for Economic Research/DIW, OECD, U.S. Treasury Department). He is currently investigating how consumers respond to the more dystopian aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation (e.g., in the areas of data privacy, explainability of algorithms, and consumer autonomy).

His work has appeared in leading scientific journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Psychological Science. His work was featured by the Financial Times, Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review and has received international newspaper, radio, and TV coverage by various media outlets including BBC Radio, Le Figaro, National Public Radio, Nightly Business Report, Psychology Today, Tagesspiegel, The Economist.com, and U.S. Industry Today. His research won the 1995 American Marketing Association (AMA) Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2005 AMA O’Dell Award, the most prestigious annual award in marketing, for the Journal of Marketing Research article that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing over the previous five years. He was a finalist for the 2006 and 2009 Journal of Consumer Research Best Article Awards. He was also selected as one of the inaugural Marketing Science Institute Young Scholars in 2001.

Klaus is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. He has served as the launching editor-in-chief of the Journal of Marketing Behavior, as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research, among others, for many years.

He holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of Chicago and an M.Sc. (Diploma) in Psychology from the Darmstadt University of Technology in his native Germany. At INSEAD, he has been based in both Singapore and Fontainebleau and has served as the director of what is now the INSEAD-Sorbonne Université Behavioural Lab in Paris. Before joining INSEAD, he was a faculty member at Duke University and then at Yale University. Klaus also held appointments as Visiting Professor of Marketing at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009 and at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2013, where he was also the Judith C. and William G. Bollinger Visiting Professor.

PUBLICATIONS

• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Performance Pay or Redistribution? Cultural Differences in Just-World Beliefs and Preferences for Wage Inequality - Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Self-Signaling and the Costs and Benefits of Temptation - Journal of Marketing Research
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Free Will, Temptation, and Self-Control: We Must Believe in Free Will, We Have No Choice - Journal of Consumer Psychology
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - The Value Heuristic in Judgments of Relative Frequency - Psychological Science
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - On the Perceived Value of Money: The Reference Dependence of Currency Numerosity Effects - Journal of Consumer Research
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Indeterminacy and Live Television - Journal of Consumer Research
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - When Do Losses Loom Larger than Gains? - Journal of Marketing Research
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Option Attachment: When Deliberating Makes Choosing Feel like Losing - Journal of Consumer Research
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment - Psychological Science
• JOURNAL ARTICLES - Measuring Consumer Willingness to Pay at the Point of Purchase - Journal of Marketing Research

RESEARCH AREAS

Behavioural Economics and Consumer Choice, Intertemporal Choice, Temptation, and Self-Control, Consumer Financial Decision-Making

TEACHING AREAS

Behavioural Economics and Consumer Choice, Brand Management, Behavioral Pricing, Marketing Management