44th American Marketing Association Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium: Managing Brands and Customers for Profit - June 11-14, 2009 - Georgia State University

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Namika Sagara
University of Oregon

Namika Sagara

Namika Sagara has received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Psychology and currently is a fourth-year marketing doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon. Starting as an undergraduate research assistant in 2001 in the Decision Research and Psychology department at the University of Oregon, her background and interest lies in affect and decision making.  Since then, she has been collaborating with a number of psychologists and marketing researchers in Oregon, such as Ellen Peters, Paul Slovic, Lynn Kahle and Peter Wright, and also outside of Oregon, such as Christopher Olivola from Princeton and Stephan Dickert from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Her collaborative work with Peters includes the role of affect and numeracy in decision making. She, Dickert and Slovic investigate the role of affect and scope insensitivity in judgment of willingness-to-contribute.  With Kahle, she investigates different ingratiation processes across different cultures, such as U.S. and Japan. Her extensive life and academic experiences in multi-cultures (e.g., U.S., Japan and Malaysia) have helped to shape this research. She and Olivola demonstrate, using Decision by Sampling theory, both a theoretical and empirical account of the psychophysics of human life valuation. Wright chairs her dissertation that demonstrates the modified version of Illusion-of-Truth effect using crucial numeric information and the role of numeracy and affect in numeric information processing. She further demonstrates that the less numerate individuals were more susceptible to scope neglect. In the subsequent studies, she attempts to help consumers, especially less numerate consumers, use numeric information more in their judgments and decisions.