About

Joseph K. Goodman is a Professor of Marketing and (by courtesy) Psychology at The Ohio State University, and he is a former Chair of the Department of Marketing & Logistics. His research seeks to understand consumer decision making in today’s marketplace, with interests including consumer happiness and well-being related to material and experiential purchases, consumers’ attraction to large product assortments, and the role of crowdsourcing tools such as Mechanical Turk in consumer research. His work has been published in various reputable journals, and he has taught courses at undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels, including Principles of Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Brand Management, and Judgment and Decision Making. Prior to his current position, Professor Goodman was on the faculty at the University of South Carolina and Washington University in St. Louis, where he co-founded the CB Research Lab. He holds a BSBA (Honors) and a PhD in Marketing from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Business
• Social psychology
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Marketing
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Engineering
• Advertising
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Subjective Well-Being Enhances Experiential Perceptions

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2026-03-31

  article

  The experiential advantage refers to the well-being people derive from experiences over material goods. This research took a psychological needs approach and tested whether well-being predicts seeing purchases and products as being able to offer experiences. Five studies, using trait and state measures of well-being and sampling people in Asia and North America, supported this hypothesis. Controlled studies found that people higher in trait well-being viewed purchases as more experiential (Studies 1 and 5). Momentary well-being, whether measured or manipulated, showed a similarly positive impact of higher well-being on experiential perceptions (Studies 2-4). The effect was specific to perceptions of the experiential nature of products, not their materiality, and was most consistent for the positive affect component of well-being. Combined with prior findings, results suggest a self-reinforcing, benevolent cycle: experiences improve well-being, and well-being orients people to the experiential, need-satisfying aspects of products, which may then further support well-being.

  PublisherDOI

• Experiencing Consumption: The Social Nature and Physicalization of the Ephemeral

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2025-08-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Starbucks effect: When name-based order identification increases customers' store preference and service satisfaction

  Journal of Retailing · 2024-06-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• MTurk and Online Panel Research

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-30 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Online platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), CloudResearch, and Prolific have become a common source of data for behavioral researchers and consumer psychologists alike. This chapter reviews contemporary issues associated with online panel research, discussing first how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the extent to which researchers use online panels and the workers participating on certain online panels. The chapter explores how factors like a TikTok video can impact who uses these online panels and why. A longitudinal study of researcher perceptions and data quality practices finds that many practices do not align with current recommendations. The authors provide several recommendations for researchers to conduct high-quality behavioral research online, including the use of appropriate prescreens before data collection, data analysis preregistration practices, and avoiding post-screens after data collection that are not preregistered. Finally, the authors recommend researchers thoroughly report details on recruitment, restrictions, completion rates, and any differences in dropout rates across conditions.

  PublisherDOI

• What Makes People Happy? Decoupling the Experiential-Material Continuum

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• What makes people happy? Decoupling the experiential‐material continuum

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2022 · 27 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Pedagogy

  Abstract Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative dominance: more material or more experiential. This focus on relative dominance leaves unanswered questions regarding how different levels of material and experiential qualities each contribute to happiness. Four preregistered studies ( N = 3,288), using hundreds of product categories, measured levels of material and experiential qualities using two unipolar items. These studies investigate recalled, evoked, and anticipated happiness. Results show a more nuanced view of the experiential advantage that is critical for future research and consumer theory: material and experiential qualities both have positive relationships with happiness. Further, there is no inherent trade‐off between experiential and material qualities: consumers can enjoy consumption that is high on both (e.g., swimming pools and home improvements).

  PublisherDOI

• The Threshold-Crossing Effect: Just-Below Pricing Discourages Consumers to Upgrade

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2021 · 25 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Microeconomics

  Abstract Managers often set prices just-below a round number (e.g., $39)—a strategy that lowers price perceptions and increases sales. The authors question this conventional wisdom in a common consumer context: upgrade decisions (e.g., whether to upgrade a rental car or hotel room). Seven studies—including one field study—provide empirical evidence for a threshold-crossing effect. When a base product is priced at or just-above a threshold, consumers are more likely to upgrade and spend more money (studies 1–3) because they perceive the upgrade option as less expensive (study 4), and they place less weight on price (study 5). Testing theoretically motivated and managerially relevant boundary conditions, studies find that the threshold-crossing effect is mitigated under sequential choice (study 6) and when an upgrade price crosses an upper threshold (study 7). These studies demonstrate that a small increase in price on a base product can decrease price perceptions of an upgrade option and, thus, increase consumers’ likelihood to upgrade. Results suggest that just-below pricing, while sometimes advantageous at first, may not always be an optimal strategy for managers trying to encourage consumers to ultimately choose an upgrade option.

  PublisherDOI

• The upgrade pricing effect

  2021-03-29

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Choosing what to choose from: Preference for inclusion over exclusion when constructing consideration sets from large choice sets

  Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · 2020-07-28 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Decision making is a two‐stage process, consisting of, first, consideration set construction and then final choice. Decision makers can form a consideration set from a choice set using one of two strategies: including the options they wish to further consider or excluding those they do not wish to further consider. The authors propose that decision makers have a relative preference for an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when choosing from large choice sets and that this preference is driven primarily by a lay belief that inclusion requires less effort than exclusion, particularly in large choice sets. Study 1 demonstrates that decision makers prefer using an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when faced with large choice sets. Study 2 replicates the effect of choice set size on preference for consideration set construction strategy and demonstrates that the belief that exclusion is more effortful mediates the relative preference for inclusion in large choice sets. Studies 3 and 4 further support the importance of perceived effort, demonstrating a greater preference for inclusion in large choice sets when decision makers are primed to think about effort (vs. accuracy; Study 3) and when the choice set is perceived as requiring more effort because of more information being presented about each alternative (vs. more alternatives in the choice set; Study 4). Finally, Study 5 manipulates consideration set construction strategy, showing that using inclusion (vs. exclusion) in large choice sets leads to smaller consideration sets, greater confidence in the decision process, and a higher quality consideration set.

  PublisherDOI

• Experiential-Material Meta-Analysis

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2020-02-23

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Selin A. Malkoc

  16 shared

• Julie R. Irwin

  The University of Texas at Austin

  14 shared

• Evan Weingarten

  University of Southern California

  7 shared

• Moran Cerf

  7 shared

• Sarah Lim

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  6 shared

• Monic Sun

  Boston University

  5 shared

• Amar Cheema

  5 shared

• Susan M. Broniarczyk

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Marketing

  University of Texas at Austin