Ravi Dhar is the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and Director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. He also has an affiliated appointment as Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology, Yale University.
He is an expert in consumer behavior and branding, marketing management, and marketing strategy and a leader in bringing psychological insights to the study of consumer decision-making. His research focuses on using psychological principles, such as limited self-control and cognitive limitations in processing information, to investigate fundamental aspects about the formation of consumer preferences and goals in order to understand consumer behavior in the marketplace.
Over the years, he has addressed questions such as the following: How do consumers make a choice as the number of options multiply? How do people make tradeoffs between what’s fun and what’s practical? Can engaging in a selfless act lead to more selfish choices? Does making an initial purchase have an impact on their willingness to spend on additional purchase? His other research focuses on understanding consumer motivation to pursue their goals in various situations as well managing the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. In real-life situations, people hold several different, even conflicting goals that they intend to accomplish and his research explores the regulation of multiple goals in multiple goal systems. His work has been mentioned in Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, USA Today, and other popular media.
He has been a visiting professor at HEC Graduate School of Management in Paris, at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and at the Business Schools at Stanford and New York University. In addition, he has consulted to companies in a wide variety of industries, including health care, financial services, high tech, CPG and luxury goods.
He has published more than 70 articles and has received several awards for his research. He also serves or has served on the editorial boards of leading marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. He has led seminars on various marketing topics for senior executives in Asia, Europe, and North and South America.