About

Jeffrey Galak is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School of Business. His academic role involves research and teaching within the field of marketing, with a focus on how artificial intelligence and machine learning connect with business, management science, and organizational behavior. As part of the Tepper School’s faculty, he contributes to the school's strategic vision of leading at the intersection of business, technology, and analytics, guided by the principles of The Intelligent Future℠. His work supports the school's broader mission to shape the future of business education through innovative research and thought leadership.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Economics
• Social psychology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Finance
• Marketing
• Positive economics
• Epistemology
• Business

Selected publications

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

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

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Moving beyond the belief–behavior correlation question: Decision contexts facilitate beliefs' effects on behavior

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2025-12-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Specific beliefs do not correlate with seemingly relevant behaviors for many reasons. Such correlations may be low even when beliefs perfectly cause behavior (e.g., because multiple beliefs compete for influence, because beliefs have various behavioral outlets). A belief may be a necessary precursor to, but not a guarantee of, a behavior. And most critically, belief–behavior correlations may depend on the context in which behavioral decisions are made. The present article complements Lee and Albarracín's focus on how beliefs can serve as logical premises from which behavioral intentions are deduced (belief‐to‐behavior inferences) by considering how specific contexts do or do not encourage the recruitment and potential application of beliefs. Behavioral decisions can be made entirely unprompted, because the context affords a behavioral opportunity, or because a prompt requires a decision be made. These distinctions can describe naturalistic decision making and research methodologies, suggesting details of the latter can encourage misleading conclusions about a belief's behavioral relevance. Although these considerations transcend the more specific interest in correcting misinformation, a specific concern with addressing political misinformation is discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A social norms-based framework for understanding and predicting giver-recipient discrepancies in gift selection

  European Journal of Marketing · 2024-02-10 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Purpose The gift-giving literature has documented several cases in which givers and recipients do not see eye-to-eye in gift-giving decisions. To help integrate this considerable segment of the gifting literature, this paper aims to develop a social norms-based framework for understanding and predicting giver-recipient asymmetries in gift selection. Design/methodology/approach Five experimental studies test the hypotheses. Participants in these studies evaluate gifts used in previous research, choose between gifts as either gift-givers or gift-recipients, and/or indicate their level of discomfort with choosing different kinds of gifts. The gifts vary in ways that allow the authors to test the social norms-based framework. Findings Gift-giving asymmetries tend to occur when one of the gifts under consideration is less descriptively, but not less injunctively, normative than the other. This theme holds for both asymmetries recorded in the gift-giving literature and novel ones. Indeed, the authors document new asymmetries in cases where the framework would expect asymmetries to occur and, providing critical support for the framework, the absence of asymmetries in cases where the framework would not expect asymmetries to emerge. Moreover, the authors explain these asymmetries, and lack thereof, using a mechanism that is novel to the literature on gift-giving mismatches: feelings of discomfort. Research limitations/implications This research has multiple theoretical implications for the literatures studying gift-giving and social norms. A limitation of this work is that it left some (secondary) predictions of its model untested. Future research could test some of these predictions. Practical implications Billions of dollars are spent on gifts each year, making gift-giving a research topic of great practical importance. In addition, the research offers suggestions to consumers giving gifts, consumers receiving gifts, as well as marketers. Originality/value The research is original in that it creates a novel framework that predicts both the presence and absence of gift-giving asymmetries, introduces a psychological mechanism to the literature on giver-recipient gift choice asymmetries, and unifies many of the mismatches previously documented in this literature.

  PublisherDOI

• Who sees which political falsehoods as more acceptable and why: A new look at in-group loyalty and trustworthiness.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2022-06-16 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many politicians-even those who occupy some of the most powerful offices in the world-lie. Five studies examined how conservative and liberal Americans responded to media reports of politicians' falsehoods-that is, flagged falsehoods (FFs). Even accounting for partisan biases in how much participants dismissed such reports as fake news and assumed that such lies were unintentional, we consistently observed partisan evaluations in how much FFs were seen as justifiable: Republicans and Democrats alike saw their own party's FFs as more acceptable (Studies 1-4). This charitability did not reflect unconditional in-group favoritism. Instead, it was strongest for policy FFs-those meant to advance a party's explicit agenda-as opposed to personal FFs about a politician's past (Study 2) or electoral FFs that strayed from parties' explicit goals by aiming to disenfranchise legally eligible voters (Study 4). Although FFs can undermine general trustworthiness in the eyes of both in-group and out-group members, policy FFs in particular signal partisan trustworthiness (Studies 3-5)-the belief that a politician can be trusted by their own political side and not by the other. For likeminded partisans, such partisan trustworthiness predicted not only the perceived acceptability of FFs, but also perceptions of the politician as a more prototypically moral actor, even outside of the political sphere. These findings validate the importance of our dual conception of trustworthiness in intergroup contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• An integrative review of gift‐giving research in consumer behavior and marketing

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2022 · 76 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Marketing

  Abstract In recent decades, scholars across all areas of marketing have studied consumer gift‐giving behavior. Despite the growing popularity of this research topic, no extensive review of the gift‐giving literature exists. To that end, this paper offers an expansive review of research on consumer gift‐giving, focusing primarily on work coming from within the marketing discipline, but also drawing on foundational pieces from other fields. We review extant scholarship on five of gift‐giving's most important aspects—givers' motivations, givers' inputs, giver‐recipient mismatches, value creation/reduction, and the greater gift‐giving context. In doing so, we illuminate the literature's key agreements and disagreements, shed light on themes that traverse ostensibly disparate gift‐giving findings, and develop deeper conceptualizations of gifting constructs. Moreover, we identify opportunities for improvement in the gift‐giving literature and use them to create key agendas for future gift‐giving research. In sum, this paper offers a single point of reference for gift‐giving scholars, improves academia's current understanding of gift‐giving, offers several theoretical contributions, and generates multiple paths for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Identifying the temporal profiles of hedonic decline

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2022-02-07 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The unfortunate reality of the human condition is that enjoyable experiences become less enjoyable with time and repetition. This hedonic decline has been well documented across a variety of stimuli and experiences. However, previous work has largely ignored the possibility that the temporal profile of hedonic decline varies at the individual level. In the present work, we first identify three temporal profiles of hedonic decline: flat, steady decline, and rapid onset decline. We next demonstrate that these temporal profiles of hedonic decline are relatively stable across both stimuli and time for any given individuals. That is, a temporal profile observed for one stimulus can be used to predict the temporal profile of hedonic decline for a novel stimulus or the same stimulus at a future date. We further explore the psychological underpinnings of these differences and note that Need for Cognition, a stable personality trait, partially explains which individuals will be more likely to experience different temporal profiles. Finally, we demonstrate two important downstream consequences to these three different temporal profiles of hedonic decline: re-consumption choice and re-consumption timing. This work provides a first look into the various ways in which hedonic decline operates at an individual level and documents predictable heterogeneity in such tendencies, an important departure from previous research looking at hedonic decline in aggregate.

  PublisherDOI

• Gift Recipients’ Beliefs About Occasion‐based and Nonoccasion‐based Gifts: The Importance of Signaling Care and Meeting Expectations in Gift Giving

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2021 · 33 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Economics

  Most gifts are occasion‐based as opposed to nonoccasion‐based . That is, most gifts are given in the presence of a special occasion, rather than in the absence of one. Across a series of scenario‐based studies, the present research demonstrates that, despite occasion‐based gifts being much more common, recipients anticipate that their happiness levels will be quite high when receiving nonoccasion‐based gifts, varying little with gift quality. In contrast, they anticipate that their happiness levels will not always be high when receiving occasion‐based gifts, varying greatly with gift quality. These diverging outcomes arise because the caliber of gift that is required to signal care and thus meet a recipient’s expectation is much lower for nonoccasion‐based gifts than for occasion‐based ones. Critically, givers misforecast recipients’ anticipated positive reactions to nonoccasion‐based gifts, helping to explain why these gifts are, unfortunately, rather rare.

  PublisherDOI

• 2019 Academic Marketing Climate Survey: motivation, results, and recommendations

  Marketing Letters · 2021-05-06 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2019 Academic Marketing Climate Survey: response to commentaries

  Marketing Letters · 2021-07-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trickle-Down Preferences: Preferential Conformity to High Status Peers in Fashion Choices

  UNC Libraries · 2020-04-21

  articleOpen access

  How much do our choices represent stable inner preferences versus social conformity? We examine conformity and consistency in sartorial choices surrounding a common life event of new norm exposure: relocation. A large-scale dataset of individual purchases of women’s shoes (16,236 transactions) across five years and 2,007 women reveals a balance of conformity and consistency, moderated by changes in location socioeconomic status. Women conform to new local norms (i.e., average heel size) when moving to relatively higher status locations, but mostly ignore new local norms when moving to relatively lower status locations. In short, at periods of transition, it is the fashion norms of the rich that trickle down to consumers. These analyses provide the first naturalistic large-scale demonstration of the tension between psychological conformity and consistency, with real decisions in a highly visible context.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leif D. Nelson

  46 shared

• Joseph P. Simmons

  34 shared

• Robyn A. LeBoeuf

  Washington University in St. Louis

  26 shared

• Joseph P. Redden

  16 shared

• Justin Kruger

  14 shared

• Julian Givi

  West Virginia University

  14 shared

• Yang Yang

  Sumy National Agrarian University

  10 shared

• Andrew T. Stephen

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Operations Research

  Carnegie Mellon University

  2002

• M.S., Operations Research

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1998

• B.S., Operations Research and Industrial Engineering

  University of Pittsburgh

  1996