Deborah Small
760 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA19104
Phone: (215) 898-6494
Fax: (215) 898-2534
deborahs@wharton.upenn.edu

Personal Website

Research Interests: Judgment and decision making, emotion, charitable giving, risk perception, negotiation, medical decision making, and decision making in marriage
 
 

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Deborah Small
Associate Professor of Marketing and Psychology


Professor Deborah Small's research interfaces psychology and economics, examining fundamental processes that underlie human decision making.

Professor Small studies many decision contexts, including charitable giving, terrorism, negotiation, buyer and seller behavior, and medical decision making. Professor Small's research has been published in top-tier academic journals including Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, and Harvard Business Review.

Professor Small teaches consumer behavior in the undergraduate, MBA, and PhD programs. She received her PhD in Psychology and Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University and her BS from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the graduate faculty of the Psychology Department at Penn.

Publications
Fern Lin, Deborah Small (2012), Cheapened Altruism: Discounting prosocial behavior by friends of victims, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117, 269-274
Jeff Galak, Deborah Small, Andrew Stephen (2011), Micro-finance Decision Making: A Field Study of Prosocial Lending, Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 48, 130-137
Scott I. Rick, Deborah Small, Eli J. Finkel (2011), Fatal (fiscal) attraction: Tightwads and Spendthrifts in Marriage, Journal of Marketing Research, 48(2), 228-237
Deborah Small (2010), Reference-dependent sympathy, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 112, 151-160
Deborah Small, Nicole Verrochi (2009), The face of need: Facial emotion expression on charity advertisements, Journal of Marketing Research, 46, 777-787

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In The News
Why we give to charity, Boston Globe, 12/04/2011
Haiti response is boon and challenge for nonprofits, The Record, 01/18/2010
Opposites that attract, Philadelphia Daily News, 08/18/2009
I say spend. You say no. We're in love, New York Times, 08/15/2009
With spending, opposites attract and repel, Yahoo! Finance, 08/12/2009

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Awards
Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, 2009
Fellow, Wharton Risk and Decision Processes Center, 2007
Social Issues Dissertation Award Finalist, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 2005
APA Science Directorate Dissertation Award, $1000, 2003
Russell Sage Foundation, small research grant for “Identifiability”, $3500, 2003

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Knowledge@Wharton Subscribe
'Masculine Norms': Why Working Women Find It Hard to Reach the Top (08/03/2011)
Research Roundup: Fiscal Fatal Attraction, the Idiosyncrasies of Entrepreneurs and the Value of Luxury Hiding in Plain Sight (04/27/2011)
To Boycott or Not: The Consequences of a Protest (06/09/2010)
'Mustaches for Kids': Charities Adopt Private Sector Models to Tap New Funds (06/24/2009)
Baseball, Steroids and Business Ethics: How Breaches of Trust Can Change the Game (02/20/2008)
Robbing the Cradle? If Marketers Get Their Way, That Bundle of Joy Can Cost a Bundle (07/25/2007)
To Increase Charitable Donations, Appeal to the Heart -- Not the Head (06/27/2007)