Ellie Kyung

Associate Professor, Marketing Division, Babson College
Ellie J Kyung is currently an Associate Professor in the Marketing Division at Babson College. She was previously a Visiting Associate Professor in the Marketing and Management Communications Division at Cornell University’s S C Johnson College of Business, a Visiting Scholar at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Associate Professor in the Marketing area at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Prior to becoming an academic, Kyung was a consultant with Monitor Group, where she worked on client projects focused on marketing and multi-channel strategy and served as co-director of Marketspace’s Applied Interface Research Lab. She teaches the MBA core marketing course and previously taught an elective research-to-practice seminar, “Time in the Consumer Mind,” on how the psychology of time influences consumer decision making. She was awarded the Tuck Teaching Excellence Award by the Tuck Class of 2021 and was the first female professor to win an elective teaching award at Tuck.

Consumers frequently make decisions reflecting on past experiences or speculating on the outcome of future experiences. Kyung’s research is focused on the critical question of what shapes people’s mental representations when making these reflections and speculations, with the aim of understanding their behavior and decision making. Her interest is in understanding how people’s mental representations are shaped by 1) the way in which we ask questions about these experiences, 2) the response alternatives they are provided to answer these questions, and 3) the context in which these experiences in occur. In particular, she is interested in the effects of perceived time, speed, and distance on these aspects of mental representation, with a focus on implications for technology-based survey, interface, and communication design.

Kyung’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. She serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Consumer Research and recently received an Outstanding Reviewer Award (2019). She is an Associate Editor for Journal of Consumer Research was a co-chair of the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference in 2022.

Kyung holds degrees from Yale University (B.A. in Economics, International Studies) and New York University (M. Phil, Ph.D in Marketing). She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two daughters.