About

Rebecca Walker Reczek is the Berry Chair of New Technologies in Marketing and a Professor of Marketing at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. She currently serves as the college’s Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research. Dr. Reczek received her Ph.D. in marketing from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, with particular emphasis on consumer lay theories, inference-making processes, self-perceptions, and ethical decision-making. Reflecting a broader interest in consumer well-being, her work has examined these themes in the domains of food and health decision-making and sustainability. Her current research extends these areas to include consumer interactions with emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, as well as responses to marketing promotions. Her research has been published in leading marketing and psychology journals. She currently serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and has held Associate Editor roles at the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. Her work has been featured in major media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Dr. Reczek has received numerous honors for her research, including the Early Career Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology, the Kinnear Award for best article in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and the AMA–EBSCO Award for Responsible Research in Marketing. She has been recognized as both an MSI Young Scholar and an MSI Scholar and is a past president of the Society for Consumer Psychology.

Research topics

• Marketing
• Business
• Artificial Intelligence
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Advertising
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Environmental health
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Knowledge management

Selected publications

• A Framework for Understanding Consumer Response to the Depiction of Historically Underrepresented Identities in Marketing Communications

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2026-04-14

  articleSenior author

  Abstract In recent years, firms’ depictions of some historically underrepresented identities (HUIs) in marketing communications have elicited backlash, while depictions of other HUIs have been more broadly accepted. The present work develops a framework to explain when and why these divergent responses occur. We propose that, while liberals respond positively to the depiction of all HUIs due to their prioritization of the Fairness moral foundation, conservatives’ responses are more nuanced and depend on how a focal identity is perceived on two dimensions: agency and normativity with respect to descriptive norms related to bodily purity. These dimensions produce a four-quadrant typology whereby, due to their greater emphasis on the Purity/Sanctity moral foundation, conservatives respond negatively only to HUIs perceived as high on both dimensions (e.g., an obese model, a transgender model, or a model who wears a hijab). We validate this framework by showing that conservatives’ negative responses are attenuated when an identity is perceived as low on either dimension. We further identify a managerially relevant boundary condition, wherein conservatives’ negative reactions are also attenuated when the focal identity appears as a numerical minority within a broader campaign featuring primarily non-HUIs.

  PublisherDOI

• Similarity Challenge Appeals Motivate Consumers to Buy Virtuous Replacement Products

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2025-04-21

  articleSenior author

  Virtuous replacement products (e.g., plant-based meat, lab-fermented no-cocoa chocolate) are increasingly available in the marketplace. The authors define a virtuous replacement product as a product intended to offer a similar consumer experience to an existing product but that is produced in a more ethical manner (e.g., more sustainably or without human rights violations) by omitting a key characteristic typically associated with the product it is intended to replace. This research demonstrates, in both the lab and the field, that similarity challenge appeals (i.e., appeals that challenge consumers that they cannot tell the difference between a virtuous replacement product and the product it is intended to replace) are more effective at increasing purchase (and purchase intentions) of virtuous replacement products relative to appeals promoting the similarity of the consumption experience with no challenge. The findings further demonstrate that this occurs because similarity challenge appeals decrease the perceived performance risk associated with the virtuous replacement product. The authors provide evidence for this performance risk reduction mechanism through mediation. In addition, they explore whether exposure to similarity challenge appeals affects product evaluations after trial. This work provides practical insights about how to effectively promote adoption of virtuous replacement products.

  PublisherDOI

• Publishing on Emerging Topics: Strategies for Success (Free Seminar)

  2025-01-01

  reportSenior author

  This webinar aims to discuss strategies researchers can use to succeed in publishing on emerging and hot topics (e.g., intersection of marketing and AI). The webinar will touch on developing innovative research ideas, selecting appropriate journals, managing collaborations, and navigating the peer review process.

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing OSCM scientific knowledge by replicating empirical findings: Step‐by‐step procedure and illustration for transformative replication endeavors

  Decision Sciences · 2024-02-19 · 5 citations

  article

  Abstract Replication endeavors contribute to the accumulation of scientific evidence about previously reported findings and are crucial for scientific progress. Replication studies are, however, often discouraged and rarely published in the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) discipline. In this article, we offer a framework for replications consisting of two complementary tables. This framework recognizes two types of replications already defined in the literature (i.e., The Exact (EXT) Replication and the Methods‐Only (MTD) Replication) and adds to these two new types (i.e., the Bounded‐Conceptual‐Extension (BCE) Replication and the Transformative (TRF) Replication). The framework clarifies what constitutes replications, forms of replication endeavors, and their purposes. Importantly, we also differentiate replication endeavors from reproducibility tests, robustness checks, and post hoc analyses. Moreover, we describe a seven‐step procedure to guide the design, execution, and presentation of replication endeavors, illustrating these steps by conducting a TRF Replication that incorporates, at the same time, a BCE Replication and an MTD Replication of Polyviou et al. (2018). The proposed framework and seven‐step procedure hopefully motivate OSCM scholars to embrace replications as valuable scientific endeavors that can yield corroborating evidence to bolster confidence in previously reported findings and, better yet, provide new nuanced findings to advance precise scientific understanding of past and new OSCM phenomena.

  PublisherDOI

• Hype-free AI: How AI actually impacts psychology in research, the workplace, the marketplace, and beyond

  Current Opinion in Psychology · 2024-11-09

  editorialSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Better late than never? Gift givers overestimate the relationship harm from giving late gifts

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2024-12-05 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Past work has found that there is often a mismatch between the types of gifts that individuals send and the types of gifts that recipients would prefer to receive. Moving beyond gift choice, the present work explores a novel type of giver–recipient mismatch—beliefs about the importance of sending an on‐time gift. Specifically, the current work offers evidence that gift givers systematically overestimate the negative impact that a late occasion‐based gift will have on their relationship with the recipient, which occurs because gift givers believe that sending a late gift will signal that they care about the recipient to a lesser extent than what the recipient perceives. As such, gift givers' overestimation of relationship harm from a late gift is attenuated when they signal care in some other way (e.g., with the amount of effort put into creating the gift). Finally, we explore the consequences of degree of gift lateness as well as the decision to not send an occasion‐based gift at all on gift givers' overestimation of relationship harm.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Consumer AI Experience

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-06-04

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Why sending a belated gift is not as bad as you probably think − and late is better than never

  2024-12-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Avoiding embarrassment online: Response to and inferences about chatbots when purchases activate self‐presentation concerns

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2024-02-14 · 55 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract We explore how self‐presentation concerns and the desire to avoid embarrassment impact two distinct types of interactions consumers have with chatbots: interactions when a chatbot's identity is (1) not disclosed and therefore ambiguous or (2) disclosed. We propose that consumers feel less embarrassed with a chatbot than a human service agent in purchase contexts where self‐presentation concerns are active because consumers ascribe less mind to chatbots. Therefore, when a chat agent's identity is ambiguous, consumers with greater self‐presentation concerns are more likely to infer that an agent is human because this judgment allows consumers to proactively protect themselves from potential embarrassment in the event they are interacting with a human. We further show that when agent identity is clearly disclosed, consumers respond more positively to chatbots than human agents. However, this effect is contingent on the extent to which the chatbot is imbued with human characteristics: Anthropomorphizing chatbots leads consumers with higher self‐presentation concerns to ascribe more mind to even clearly identified chatbots, resulting in a more negative consumer response.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How lack of knowledge on emissions and psychological biases deter consumers from taking effective action to mitigate climate change

  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2023-10-23 · 45 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cait Lamberton

  Penn Center for AIDS Research

  15 shared

• Kelly L. Haws

  15 shared

• Daniel M. Zane

  13 shared

• Julie R. Irwin

  The University of Texas at Austin

  11 shared

• A. Michael Knemeyer

  Fisher College

  8 shared

• Selin A. Malkoc

  7 shared

• Robert W. Smith

  6 shared

• Michael I. Norton

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Marketing

  The University of Texas at Austin

Awards & honors

• Early Career Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology
• Kinnear Award for best article in the Journal of Public Poli…
• AMA–EBSCO Award for Responsible Research in Marketing
• MSI Young Scholar
• MSI Scholar