About

Selin A. Malkoc is a Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, and also holds a courtesy appointment in Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in marketing from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her B.S. from Bilkent University. Prior to her current position, she was a faculty member at the Carlson School of Business, University of Minnesota, and at the Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, particularly intertemporal decision-making, how consumers perceive and consume their time, and the mechanisms that influence decision-making where outcomes are spread over time. She explores why consumers may show impatience despite their intentions and how they can better allocate their time between work and leisure to maximize happiness and satisfaction. Recently, her research has also examined the politicization of otherwise innocuous actions and decisions and their influence on consumer and firm behavior. Her work has been published in numerous prestigious outlets, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Science, and others. She has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and has co-chaired major conferences in her field. Dr. Malkoc has received several awards, including the Paul E. Green Award and the William F. O’Dell Award, recognizing her influential research contributions. Her research has been featured in major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, and TIME Magazine. She has also delivered a TEDx Talk and maintains a Google Scholar profile highlighting her scholarly work.

Research topics

• Marketing
• Economics
• Business
• Political Science
• Microeconomics
• Computer Science
• Monetary economics
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Engineering
• Law
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Gained Time Is Expanded: Examining the Psychological and Behavioral Consequences of Gaining Time

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2026-01-14

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  PublisherDOI

• From Bathrooms to Bag Fees: When Business Operations are Moral Battlegrounds

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• From decision patience to process patience: A decision–process integration of the choice to wait and the experience of waiting

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2026-01-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Consumer impatience has long been examined through the lens of intertemporal choice, where patience is inferred from decisions to accept delayed rewards. Yet, this conceptualization captures only the choice to wait, not the experience of waiting. Sweeny's Process Model of Patience (PMP) shifts the focus from temporal preferences to temporal affect, defining impatience as a negatively valenced emotional response to objectionable delays and patience as the active regulation of this emotion. In this commentary, I bridge these two traditions by mapping the psychological drivers of intertemporal choice—affective urges, cognitive representations, construal, subjective time perception, and future‐self connectedness—onto the mechanisms that shape waiting experiences. This decision–process integration of impatience reveals where the two perspectives converge, where they diverge, and why these distinctions matter for understanding consumer behavior. I propose several testable predictions illustrating how choice patience and process patience dissociate, how motivations and mental representations shift across the decision–waiting timeline, and how environmental cues can reduce uncertainty at choice yet heighten impatience during the wait. Together, these insights suggest a more complete temporal model of impatience—one that begins before the decision is made and continues throughout the delay that follows.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Politics in the middle: A call to study nuanced political differences in a binary world

  International Journal of Research in Marketing · 2025-09-01 · 3 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Reflection, Resilience, Rebound: Consumer Coping with the Pandemic

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2023-02-13 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author
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• For whom do boundaries become restrictions? The role of political orientation.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2023-01-30 · 3 citations

  article

  = 740; MTurk users). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Why Are Donors More Generous with Time Than Money? The Role of Perceived Control over Donations on Charitable Giving

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2022 · 60 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Social psychology

  Abstract Solicitation of time and money donations are central to the success of nonprofit organizations like charities and political groups. Although nonprofits tend to prefer money, experimental and field data demonstrate that donors prefer to donate time, even when doing so does less good for the cause. However, despite the importance of this asymmetry, little is known about its psychological underpinnings. In the current investigation, we identify a previously unexplored difference between time and money, which we argue can explain the preference to donate time over money. Specifically, we propose that potential donors feel more personal control over their time (vs. money) donations, leading to greater interest in donating and donation amount. We test this framework across seven studies using incentive-compatible and hypothetical behaviors, utilizing both mediation and moderation approaches. Our results show that when donors’ sense of control is threatened, donations of time might be used as a compensatory strategy and that simple linguistic interventions can increase perceived control and donations for money, which we find to typically lag behind time. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for marketing theory and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Is this Store Liberal (Un)like me?: Consumer Response to COVID-19 Policies in a Politically Polarized World

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2021-08-21 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• I studied people who think leisure is a waste of time – here’s what I found

  2021-08-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gal Zauberman

  Yale University

  21 shared

• Gabriela Tonietto

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  21 shared

• Joseph K. Goodman

  The Ohio State University

  16 shared

• James R. Bettman

  Duke University

  10 shared

• Steve Hoeffler

  Vanderbilt University

  9 shared

• William Hedgcock

  7 shared

• Rebecca Walker Reczek

  Fisher College

  7 shared

• Stephen M. Nowlis

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Marketing

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Other

  University of Minnesota

• Other

  Washington University in St. Louis

Awards & honors

• Paul E. Green Award
• William F. O’Dell Award
• Citation of Excellence Award