2020 HEC Foundation - Doctoral Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Dr Fei Gao who received this Tuesday the prestigious HEC Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research in developing marketing interventions to influence consumers judgment, choice, and behaviors.  

Fei Gao's research interests focus on how to motivate consumers to make better choices that increase their well-being or communal social welfare, particularly in the context of digital marketing. One stream of his research focuses on developing innovative marketing “nudges” to increase consumers’ well-being via influencing their judgments and choices. Another stream explores consumers’ prosocial behaviors in online settings such as charitable crowdfunding. In addition to studying consumer behavior and psychology from a theoretical perspective, as a marketing researcher, he strongly emphasize the importance of providing realistic, actionable, and generalizable marketing implications to benefit consumers, companies, and society.

Subject: « Essays on Marketing Interventions to Influence Consumer Judgments, Choices, and Behaviors »

Supervisors:  Professor Tina Lowrey and Professor LJ Shrum 

Abstract: This dissertation consists of three essays that develop marketing interventions to influence consumers judgment, choice, and behaviors. Essay 1 studies whether, how, and when crossmodal correspondences affect downstream judgments. Essay 2 develops a behavioral intervention aimed at reducing consumers’ choices of food portion sizes, which can be easily used in the settings of online food ordering such as food delivery apps. Essay 3 studies whether prosocial incentive scheme can effectively motivate consumers to participate in online referral programs.

Learn more about his research in a recent interview with Knowledge@HEC here. 

Today Fei is working at Bentley University (USA) as Assistant Professor.