Imperial College London
Northwestern University
Washington University in St. Louis
Stephan Seiler, Anna Tuchman, and Song Yao have been selected to receive the 2026 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award for their article, “The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects,” which appeared in the February 2021 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) of Journal of Marketing Research (JMR).
The annual Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award honors the JMR article published five years ago that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The award committee this year included Karen Page Winterich (Pennsylvania State University), Rajdeep Grewal (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Raghuram Iyengar (University of Pennsylvania). The committee provided the following statement about their choice:
“‘The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects’ makes several contributions that are important to marketing scholarship and policy practice.
The paper advances the literature on retail pass-through by documenting near-complete (97%) pass-through in a large, diverse retail setting, resolving ambiguity from prior studies. The use of rich scanner data across hundreds of stores and multiple chain formats established a template for studying cost-shock pass-through at scale.
The paper also makes a foundational contribution to the study of tax avoidance and geographic substitution. By showing that cross-shopping offsets more than half of the in-city sales reduction, the authors demonstrate that the conventional win-win narrative for localized sin taxes (i.e., revenue if consumers keep buying, health benefits if they stop), is empirically untenable, with direct influence on subsequent policy discussions around tax design.
Third, the paper breaks new ground by linking beverage taxes directly to nutritional outcomes, showing that substitution toward high-calorie untaxed products causes nutritional improvements to lag behind raw quantity reductions. This is an important finding for how researchers and policymakers evaluate the welfare effects of sin taxes.
Finally, the paper’s finding that low-income households reduce consumption less, not due to lower price sensitivity but due to limited transportation access, has challenged received wisdom and opened a productive line of inquiry into mobility and consumer response to policy interventions.”
Two other excellent papers were named finalists for the 2026 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award:
- “The Minimum Wage and Consumer Nutrition,” by Mike Palazzolo and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah
- “Psychological Ownership of (Borrowed) Money,” by Eesha Sharma, Stephanie Tully, and Cynthia Cryder
The authors will be honored at the 2026 AMA Summer Academic Conference in Denver, Colorado, on July 24–26, 2026, as well as the virtual portion of the conference on July 20.
Go to the Journal of Marketing Research