Notre Dame consumer psychologist recognized as leader of ‘next generation of marketing academics’

University of Notre Dame marketing professor Emily Garbinsky was chosen as a Marketing Science Institute (MSI) 2021 Young Scholar, a select honor intended to identify likely leaders of the next generation of marketing academics. Recipients are chosen via a rigorous process that includes a review of their curriculum vitaes, research and rankings, as well as input from former executive directors, academic trustees and current academic fellows.

Garbinsky is an assistant marketing professor and behavioral scientist at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. She earned a Ph.D. in marketing from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in June 2015 and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2010, double majoring in psychology and decision science. She joined the Notre Dame faculty in July 2015, and has taught Principles of Marketing at the undergraduate level as well as Consumer Behavior at the MBA level, earning the James Dincolo Outstanding Professor Award in April 2018. Her area of expertise is consumer financial well-being, focusing on three streams of research: 1) understanding how couples make financial decisions, 2) motivating individual consumers to make more fiscally responsible decisions, and 3) illuminating how people can maximize the happiness and enjoyment they derive from various consumption experiences. Garbinsky has published articles in leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Psychological Science. In a recent paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, “Popping the Positive Illusion of Financial Responsibility Can Increase Personal Savings: Applications in Emerging and Western Markets,” Garbinsky studied the relationship between individuals’ beliefs about their spending habits and their actual spending. (Read more about the study in this article.) Other recent studies have explored the idea of financial infidelity as well as how spending patterns change when couples use joint or separate bank accounts. Her research has been featured in popular press including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She has also won several prestigious research awards, including the 2017 BMO Wealth Management Best Paper Award as well as the 2019 Journal of Consumer Psychology’s Best Paper Award by an Early Career Contributor. MSI, a nonprofit member organization founded in 1961, convenes renowned marketing scholars and leading marketers from the world’s best companies to create an unbiased platform for scientific research, purposeful collaborations and peer-to-peer networking. The Young Scholars Program was conceived nearly two decades ago by a diverse group of marketing scholars whose interests spanned all disciplines within marketing as part of an effort to develop a cohesive class of elite scholars within marketing.