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Luk Van Wassenhove

Klaus Wertenbroch

Professor of Marketing

Biography

Klaus Wertenbroch is the Novartis Chaired Professor of Management and the Environment and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. He directs the INSEAD Strategic Marketing Programme.

Trained at the University of Chicago’s influential Center for Decision Research, Dr. Wertenbroch is an expert in behavioural economics and consumer decision-making, strategic brand management, and pricing. He has taught these topics in undergraduate, MBA, Ph.D., and executive education programmes in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and has worked with clients including Allianz, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cemex, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Ferrero, GfK, IBM, Indian Railways, Lafarge, LG, L'Oreal, Mediamarkt/Saturn, Metro, Nissan, Petronas, Philip Morris, Starwood Hotels, and Unilever.

His research focuses on behavioural economics and its strategic marketing and public policy implications. He is an expert on consumer self-control problems, with a focus on overconsumption, overspending, and consumer debt, and has contributed to financial education initiatives by the public and the private sector (e.g., Citigroup, Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, German Institute for Economic Research/DIW, OECD, U.S. Treasury Department). He is currently investigating how consumers respond to the more dystopian aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation (e.g., in the areas of data privacy, explainability of algorithms, and consumer autonomy).

His work has appeared in leading scientific journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Psychological Science. His work was featured by the Financial Times, Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review and has received international newspaper, radio, and TV coverage by various media outlets including BBC Radio, Le Figaro, National Public Radio, Nightly Business Report, Psychology Today, Tagesspiegel, The Economist.com, and U.S. Industry Today. His research won the 1995 American Marketing Association (AMA) Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2005 AMA O’Dell Award, the most prestigious annual award in marketing, for the Journal of Marketing Research article that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing over the previous five years. He was a finalist for the 2006 and 2009 Journal of Consumer Research Best Article Awards. He was also selected as one of the inaugural Marketing Science Institute Young Scholars in 2001.

Klaus is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. He has served as the launching editor-in-chief of the Journal of Marketing Behavior, as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, and as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research, among others, for many years.

He holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of Chicago and an M.Sc. (Diploma) in Psychology from the Darmstadt University of Technology in his native Germany. At INSEAD, he has been based in both Singapore and Fontainebleau and has served as the director of what is now the INSEAD-Sorbonne Université Behavioural Lab in Paris. Before joining INSEAD, he was a faculty member at Duke University and then at Yale University. Klaus also held appointments as Visiting Professor of Marketing at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009 and at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2013, where he was also the Judith C. and William G. Bollinger Visiting Professor.

Latest posts

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Marketing

Putting a Price on Private Data

G. Tomaino, K. Wertenbroch, D. Walters

People value their private data higher in cash than in digital goods or services.
2 comments

Marketing

Why Facebook Is Rebranding Itself as Meta

Klaus Wertenbroch

Is the tech company dodging bad publicity or creating a gatekeeper economy?
2 comments

Marketing

Marketing Automation: Utopia or Dystopia?

Klaus Wertenbroch

Firms must take consumer psychology into account and resist the temptation to maximise short-term profits at the cost of consumers.

Marketing

How to Appease Your Customers After Your Algorithm Rejects Them

K. Wertenbroch, P. Kireyev, G. Tomaino

No one likes to hear “computer says no”. But there may be more ways to be transparent about algorithm-driven rejections than you think.

Marketing

Consumer Autonomy Violations and the Coming AI Backlash

Z Carmon, R Schrift, K Wertenbroch & H Yang

The profoundly beneficial impact of AI-based systems may be blunted in the 2020s, if Big Tech isn’t careful.

Responsibility

Are Wage Inequalities Fair?

K. Wertenbroch, D. Frank, W. Maddux

Pay-for-performance or collective bargaining: The pay system we prefer says as much about the way we view the world as the economic conditions in which we find ourselves.