Papers
I research prosocial and anti-social behavior, often at the same time — donations weaponized to punish, status-seeking dressed up as activism, offensive consumption as identity work, and the methodological mess of how researchers even define “prosocial” in the first place. Most of this is joint work with Kirk Kristofferson and Miranda Goode at Ivey.
Published
Journal of Marketing Research, 2025
We define and test retributive philanthropy — donations made with the explicit intent of harming a third party. Across qualitative interviews with perpetrators and targets, real-world data on anti-vaccine protestor giving, and ten lab studies, we show this behavior is emotionally, motivationally, and behaviorally distinct from traditional prosocial giving.
Under Review
How Political Ideology Shapes Prosocial Consumer Behavior Research
Journal of Consumer Research · Revise and resubmit
Abstract
The current research suggests that there is a lack of political diversity in the stimuli used in prosocial consumer behavior research, which may pose challenges for the reliability and generalizability of such work. We review prosocial consumer behavior research from the leading marketing journals across twenty years and show that the study stimuli therein exhibit a consistent liberal skew. In a survey of contemporary prosocial consumer behavior researchers, we identify that the political beliefs of researchers and bias against conservative cause areas likely explain the observed political skew of stimuli in prosocial consumer research. Finally, three lab studies (N = 2,008) demonstrate that unacknowledged political valence of prosocial stimuli and the unmeasured political beliefs of participants can distort estimates of the relationship between individual differences and donation if not accounted for in a thoughtful manner. This work contributes to the literature on prosocial consumer behavior by identifying a bias in stimuli selection that has likely hampered our understanding of the full nature of prosocial consumer behavior.
Brands in Culture Wars: Why and How Brand Activism Polarizes Society
Journal of Business Ethics · Under review
Abstract
Brand activism — where brands engage in controversial public socio-political debates — is a risky branding strategy. While it can create brand value and contribute positively to society, it can also intensify polarization, damaging brand value and harming democratic debate. Seeking to minimize these risks for brands and society, this paper examines how brand activism fosters polarization. To answer this question, the authors developed a qualitative archival study of 32 brand activism campaigns mobilizing brand content as well as media and social media data. Their interpretive analysis reveals that brand activism fosters polarization through a social process of totalitarian market imagination, which involves the circulation of a constellation of mutually reinforcing market narratives — of social oppression, decay, and salvation. These constellations invalidate ideological differences as anti-social, heightening a sense of existential insecurity among all participating market actors. The analysis further identifies four types of totalitarian imaginaries that fuel polarization in distinct ways: populist battle, political war, moral crusade, and segregation struggle. This article introduces these findings, substantiates them with empirical data, and discusses their implications for theories of brand activism and market ideology. It outlines how these insights can help managers develop less polarizing brand activism campaigns.
In Progress
Fanfiction: When Copyright Violation Benefits Brands
Targeting Journal of Marketing · Drafting
Abstract
We investigate fanfiction (i.e., original fiction adopting elements of pre-existing media) as a copyright-violating phenomenon and demonstrate its benefits to brands. Our work suggests that reading fanfiction increases purchase intent and that fanfiction production rates can be used to predict next-week TV viewership. Additionally, we identify two means by which brands can grow their fanfiction communities: by waiving copyright protection and through early encouragement of fanfiction authors. We demonstrate these results across one lab study (N = 600), two real-world datasets representing billions of words of fanfiction content, and a field experiment testing the effect of AI-generated comments on fanfiction production (N = 2,162).
Targeting Journal of Consumer Psychology · Drafting
Abstract
Prior research suggests that consumers do not want to offend others and will thus avoid purchasing or displaying offensive products as a general rule. We qualify this line of research by proposing that this avoidance does not apply to outgroup-offending products, and generate a set of hypotheses regarding what conditions and individual traits are likely to result in intentional offensive consumption. Across three lab studies (N = 1,523), we demonstrate that consumers are more willing to purchase products that offend outgroups, and that such effects are strengthened when consumers are status-seeking, are high in outgroup dissociation, and have aggressive humour styles.
Targeting Journal of Marketing · Drafting
Abstract
Status motives are present across many consumer behavior domains. However, they have remained relatively underexplored in the consumer aggression literature. We find that consumers higher in status-seeking tendencies are more willing to engage in consumer aggression towards firms. We further find that consumers believe these motives to be of roughly equal importance to more standard motives for consumer aggression, but that admitting one holds status motives is subject to social desirability bias. These findings have important implications for firms that find themselves the target of consumer outrage in contexts where status motives are salient.
Defining Prosocial Consumer Behavior
Targeting Journal of Consumer Research · Three studies completed
Abstract
Prosocial consumer behavior is an increasingly popular area of study for marketing scholars. However, definitions of prosocial consumer behavior in contemporary research are few and far between. What definitions do exist are ambiguous, confusing, and contradictory with each other. The purpose of this paper is to critique past definitions of prosocial consumer behavior and leverage such critiques to generate a new, coherent, and fruitful definition of prosocial consumer behavior that will assist future researchers in better articulating the ways in which the phenomena they study are or are not prosocial consumer behavior.