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Gal Zauberman, B. Kyu Kim, Selin A. Malkoc, and James R. Bettman have been selected as the recipients of the 2013 William F. O’Dell award for their article “,” which appeared in the August 2009 (Volume 46, Number 4) issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

The award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published in 2009 that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The O’Dell award committee—which comprises Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp (chair), Teck Ho, and Dilip Soman—applauds the nominees for excellent articles that were all worthy of the award.

Ultimately, the article was selected because of its impact on academia, practice, and policy. As the letter of recommendation stated:

There is a very large literature on intertemporal choice in marketing and allied fields. The key issue here is how the decision is affected by the timing of the outcomes of the decision. The central phenomenon is “discounting”—outcomes in the future get less weight than outcomes in the present. The “normative” benchmark is the exponential discounting model attributed to Samuelson (1937), but the behavioral finding is hyperbolic or “present-biased” discounting…. The rate at which the future is discounted (value at t vs. t + 1) increases when t gets closer in time. Zauberman et al. stand this literature on its head and give a cognitive, perceptual account of the central phenomenon. They argue and show that people discount utility by subjective time, not by objective time. There is a nonlinear relation between how many days, months, or years away some time period is and how far away it seems. Once one has this profound insight, many of the standard results in the literature can be explained in these terms. We in marketing often lament how little our findings are exported outside our narrow community of marketing scholars. If one looks at who is citing this paper, you see very serious people in marketing, economics, and psychology writing in the best journals citing these findings.

The award is presented annually at the ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍø’s Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference.

• Gal Zauberman is Professor of Marketing and Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
• B. Kyu Kim is Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Southern California
• Selin A. Malkoc is Associate Professor of Marketing, Washington University
• James R. Bettman is Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration, Duke University