Gil Appel

Gil Appel is an assistant professor of marketing at the GW School of Business. Dr. Appel received his B.A. in Management and Economics in 2003 and his M.B.A. (2009) from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He received his Ph.D. (2016, in Marketing) from the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Professor Appel’s research has focused on the rapidly growing digital domain, within which he is interested in two main arcs: The first arc is the evolution of digital markets, from e-commerce to social networks to mobile domains. Using quantitative models, he examines new products’ development and growth, and how such markets differ from traditional ones. His second research arc uses digital markets to examine individual behavior. Specifically, using individual-level data to examine the process wherein individual-level behavior manifests as segment and market dynamics. Dr. Appel work addresses important behavioral questions that relates to disparity, social processes, social norms, consumers’ choice heuristics and biases in the markets.

Dr. Appel has published on the subject of digital markets in top academic journals Management Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS).

Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington University in 2020, Dr. Appel served on the faculty of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, where he won the USC Marshall Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence.

Select Publications

• Gil Appel, Barak Libai, and Eitan Muller (2018), “On the Monetary Impact of Fashion Design Piracy,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(4), 591-610. Also published as part of MSI’s working paper series (2013) [13-108]. Finalist for the 2018 IJRM Best Article Award.
• Gil Appel, Lauren Grewal, Rhonda Hadi, and Andrew Stephen (2020), “The Future of Social Media in Marketing,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48, 79-95.
• Gil Appel, Barak Libai, Eitan Muller, and Ron Shachar (2020), “On the Monetization of Mobile Apps,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 37(1), 93-107.
• Yaniv Shani, Gil Appel, Shai Danziger, and Ron Shachar (2020), “When and Why Consumers “Accidently” Endanger Their Products,” accepted at Management Science.
• Priyanka Joshi, Cheryl Wakslak, Gil Appel, and Laura Huang (2020), “Gender Differences in Communicative Abstraction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(3), 417-435. Also featured in Psychology Today (2019). Also featured in Forbes (2019).