The Aspen Institute

Rebecca Ratner is an associate professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Prior to joining the faculty at the Smith School, Ratner was associate professor of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, a visiting scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a visiting faculty fellow at the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing at the University of Chicago. Her research explores factors underlying suboptimal decision making and focuses on variety seeking, affective forecasting, and the influence of social norms. Her work has appeared in leading marketing, psychology, and decision-making journals, including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She is a recipient of the Academy of Management Best Paper Award (for the most influential paper in conflict management from 1998-2001) and is the recipient of several teaching awards for her courses on consumer behavior and marketing management, which she has taught to MBA students, undergraduate students, and executives. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Economic Psychology and is associate editor for Journal of Consumer Research. She holds a M.A. degree in psychology from Williams College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton University.