John G Lynch Jr., Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
PhD, University of Illinois, 1979
mailing address: A324 Fuqua Sch of Bus Durham, NC 27708
office: A324 Fuqua Sch of Bus
email:
phone: (919) 660-7766

research interests | publications | lab web site | curriculum vita

Research Summary:
 Lynch's research focuses on three main areas of consumer psychology:

  1. consumer information processing and decision making
  2. information economics and its intersection with consumer psychology
  3. validity issues in research methodology
In the consumer information processing area, Lynch's research has focused particularly on decisions in which some or all of the relevant information comes from memory.  He has investigated three main questions: What determines the alternatives that are actively considered for choice in consumer decision making? What determines what inputs are used to evaluate those inputs that are included in the consideration set? For example, under what conditions to people choose by comparing alternatives on their features and when do they choose on the basis of remembered overall affect without actively thinking about the reasons for that liking or disliking? What determines the relative weight people give to immediate versus delayed consequences? How do marketing variables influence consumer choice through their influence on the alternatives considered or by determining which small number of inputs are used in decision making out of a large potential
universe?

In his work on information economics and consumer psychology, Lynch has examined how certain broad classes of information in markets affect consumer welfare, as measured by the prices they pay and the satisfaction they obtain from their purchases.  He has studied such issues as whether advertising increases or decreases consumer price
sensitivity or whether online shopping should lead to more or less price sensitivity in comparison with brick and mortar shopping.

In his work on validity issues in research methodology, he has written about how design choices determine the external validity of experimental research findings, how confounding affects the validity of inferences from experiments, and what determines whether answers in a survey carry over to determine answers to later questions in the same survey.

Representative Publications:   (More Publications)

  1. Lynch, J.G. Jr. "Accessible but Nondiagnostic Memories about Memory and Consumer Choice." 16th Paul D. Converse Symposium. Ed. Abbie Griffin and Cele Otnes Chicago: American Marketing Association, 2005: 88-115.
  2. Zauberman, G. & Lynch, J. G. (2005). Resource slack and discounting of future time versus money. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(1), 23-37.
  3. Ariely, D., Lynch, J. G., Aparicio, M. (2004). Learning by collaborative and individual-based recommendation agents. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 81-95.
  4. Diehl, K., Kornish, L., & Lynch, J. G. (2003). Smart agents: When lower search costs for quality information increase price sensitivity. Journal of Consumer Research, 30, 56-71.
  5. Wood, S. L. & Lynch, J. G. (2002). Prior knowledge and complacency in new product learning. Journal of Consumer Research, 29, 416-426.