2012 William F. O’Dell Award

Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely have been selected as the recipients of the 2012 William F. O’Dell award for their article “The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance” which appeared in the June 2008 (Volume 46, Number 6) issue.

The award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published in 2008 that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The O’Dell award committee comprised of Eric Bradlow (Wharton), Akshay Rao (Minnesota) and Gerry Tellis (USC) applaud all four finalists for excellent papers that were all worthy of the award.  We selected the winning paper based upon the first round votes, citation count, our careful reading of the papers, and letters of recommendations submitted.

Ultimately, the paper selected was picked because of its impact on academia, practice, and policy.  As put by the letter of recommendation submitted:

“It is truly original. I think I am correct in saying that Mazar et al. is the most influential paper published in a marketing journal on the moral psychology of consumer behavior.  This is fast emerging as a major growth area in consumer behavior research. At the upcoming ACR-Barcelona conference, there is a pre-conference on this topic that is apparently about to hit a capacity constraint, based on a post this week on ACR-L.

We in marketing often lament how little our findings are exported outside our narrow community of marketing scholars.  If one looks at who is citing this paper on Web of Knowledge, you see the most recent cites from: OBHDP (sweatshop labor); JCR (moral decoupling in treatment of celebrity endorsers; moral reasoning; effects disclosures of conflict of interest); JESP (moral psychology), JPSP (use of clean and dirty money); Behavioral and Brain Sciences (reasoning in service of argumentation rather than understanding); AER (preferences for truthfulness); JEBO (Lies and biased evaluations); Games and Economic Behavior (profit seeking incentives and norm adherence); Economica (individual and corporate responsibility); Accounting Review (codes of ethics and effects on investor confidence); Rev. of Accounting Studies (reputation management in earnings disclosure), etc. JAMA (physician influence by health care company gifts). It is really rare even among O’Dell Award winners to have that magnitude and breadth of influence.” 

We hope others see this paper as impactful as the committee. The award is presented annually at the American Marketing Association’s Summer Educator’s Marketing Educators Conference.

·          Nina Mazar is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Science Leadership Program Fellow at the University of Toronto.

·          On Amir is Associate Professor of Marketing at UC San Diego.

·          Dan Ariely is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight

The other finalists were as follows:

Recommendation Systems with Purchase Data

Anand V. Bodapati 

The Financial Value Impact of Perceptual Brand Attributes

Natalie Mizik and Robert Jacobson

Cross-Sectional Versus Longitudinal Survey Research: Concepts, Findings, and Guidelines

Aric Rindfleisch, Alan J. Malter, Shankar Ganesan, and Christine Moorman