Research prowess by members of Fisher’s Department of Marketing and Logistics recently garnered national recognition from the American Marketing Association (AMA) and affiliated groups. Individual papers and cumulative work by Rebecca Walker Reczek and Greg Allenby were honored for advancing the field of marketing.

Reczek, who holds the Dr. H. Lee “Buck” Mathews Professor of Marketing at Fisher, co-authored two papers that were selected as finalists for the AMA-EBSCO Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing at the AMA’s Winter Academic Conference in San Diego, California. The paper, “Keeping the Memory but Not the Possession: Memory Preservation Mitigates Identity Loss from Product Disposition,” was one of seven selected as a winning paper.

“The article addresses a very real problem for many Americans — struggling to get rid of possessions — and examines how to help people let go of unwanted possessions while getting them to nonprofits that depend on donated goods,” Reczek said. “I appreciate the fact that the AMA collaborated with EBSCO to create an award specifically to honor marketing research focused on making the world a better place and I feel very honored to be a recipient of the award in its inaugural year.”

Reczek’s second paper, “Healthy Diets Make Empty Wallets: The Healthy = Expensive Intuition,” was a finalist.

“Rebecca’s publication record is just another piece of evidence of her consistent impact on the field of consumer behavior,” said Joe Goodman, chair of the Department of Marketing and Logistics. “Rebecca’s research has changed how consumer researchers think about ethical decision making and consumer lay theories — from food and health to sustainability and disposal.”

Reczek also was part of a research team that collaborated on an article that won the 2020 Thomas C. Kinnear Award. The honor is presented in recognition of an article that appears in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing that makes the most significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues within the most recent three-year time period. The winning paper was “The Squander Sequence: Understanding Food Waste at Each Stage of the Consumer Decision-Making Process.”

“The paper is among the first to examine how an understanding of consumer psychology can be used to reduce food waste and was a collaboration with other scholars who have prioritized consumer well-being in their research,” Reczek said. “I was very happy to be a part of this collaboration and very grateful to see our article recognized with this award.”

“Both of these awards recognize research that has the goal of not just making a theoretical contribution to the academic literature in marketing, but also developing insights that can be used to help consumers and society.”

Allenby, the Helen C. Kurtz Chair in Marketing at Fisher, was recognized by the AMA’s Doctoral Special Interest Group (DocSIG) for his research productivity. He ranked No. 7 in the DocSig 40-in-4 List, which acknowledges the top 40 researchers whose work has been published in the four leading marketing journals — Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science.

From 2010-2019, Allenby authored 18 articles that appeared in those publications.

“Greg was not only one of the pioneers of Bayesian methods in marketing – he literally wrote the book on it — but this award represents his continuing positive force on the field of marketing methods and research,” Goodman said. “It’s really hard to describe how important his contribution has been to not only the marketing department at Ohio State, but especially to the numerous Fisher PhD students he has mentored over the years.”

Reczek was also included on the top-40 list. She was ranked No. 36 with 11 articles published.