Ellie Kyung

Ellie J. Kyung is currently a Visiting Scholar at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and was previously an Associate Professor in the Marketing area at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She will join the Marketing faculty of Babson College in August 2022. Prior to becoming an academic, Kyung was a consultant with Monitor Group where she worked on client projects focused on marketing and multi-channel strategy and served as co-director of Marketspace’s Applied Interface Research Lab. She teaches the MBA core marketing course and an elective research-to-practice seminar, “Time in the Consumer Mind,” on how the psychology of time influences consumer decision making. Recently, she was awarded the Tuck Teaching Excellence Award by the Tuck Class of 2021. She is the first female professor to win an elective teaching award at Tuck.

Consumers frequently make decisions reflecting on past experiences or speculating on the outcome of future experiences. Kyung’s research is focused on the critical question of what shapes people’s mental representations when making these reflections and speculations, with the aim of understanding their behavior and decision making. Her interest is in understanding how people’s mental representations are shaped by 1) the way in which we ask questions about these experiences, 2) the response alternatives they are provided to answer these questions, and 3) the context in which these experiences in occur. In particular, she is interested in the effects of perceived time, speed, and distance on these aspects of mental representation, with a focus on implications for survey, interface, and communication design.

Kyung’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. She serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Consumer Research and recently received an Outstanding Reviewer Award (2019). She is an Associate Editor for Journal of Consumer Research and a co-chair of the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference in 2022.

Kyung holds degrees from Yale University (B.A. in Economics, International Studies) and New York University (M. Phil, Ph.D in Marketing). She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Andy Park (CEO of CarNow), and two daughters, Maxine and Roxane.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Effects of Memory and Mental Representation on Consumer Judgments
• Psychology of Magnitude Judgments: Distance (temporal, physical, social), Intensity, Size, Speed
• Scale Design and Response Bias
• Digital Interface Design (implications based on the interests above)

Publications

• Kyung, Ellie J., Yael Shani Feinstein, and Jacob Goldenberg, “Speeding Away from the Here and Now: Velocity and Mental Representation,” conditionally accepted, Journal of Consumer Research.

• Kyung, Ellie J., Manoj Thomas, and Aradhna Krishna, “How Political Identity Influences Covid-19 Risk Perceptions: A Model of Identity-Based Risk Perceptions,” conditionally accepted, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

• Thomas, Manoj and Ellie Kyung (2019), "Slider Scale or Text Box: How Response Format Shapes Responses," Journal of Consumer Research, 45 (6), 1274-1293.

• Kyung, Ellie J., Manoj Thomas, and Aradhna Krishna (2017), “When Bigger is Better (and When It is Not): Implicit Bias in Numeric Judgments,” Journal of Consumer Research, 44 (1), 62-79.

• Kyung, Ellie J. and Manoj Thomas (2016), "When Remembering Disrupting Knowing: Blocking Implicit Price Memory," Journal of Marketing Research, 53 (6), 937-953.

• Galak, Jeff, Joseph P. Redden, Yang Yang, and Ellie J. Kyung (2014), “How Perceptions of Temporal Distance Influence Satiation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 118-123.

• Kyung, Ellie J., Geeta Menon, and Yaacov Trope (2014), “Construal Level and Temporal Judgments of the Past: The Moderating Role of Knowledge,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 21 (3), 734-739.

• Kyung, Ellie J., Geeta Menon, and Yaacov Trope (2010), “Reconstruction of Things Past: Why Do Some Memories Feel So Close And Others So Far Away?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1), 217-220.

• Menon, Geeta, Ellie J. Kyung, and Nidhi Agrawal (2009), “Biases in Social Comparison: Optimism or Pessimism?” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 108 (1), 39-52.

• Rayport, Jeffrey F., Bernard J. Jaworski, and Ellie J. Kyung (2005), “Best Face Forward: Improving Companies’ Service Interfaces with Customers,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, 19 (4), 67-80.