About
Scott Rick is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Rick received his PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and he then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Wharton. Rick’s research focuses on understanding the emotional causes and consequences of consumer financial decision-making, with a particular interest in the behavior of tightwads and spendthrifts. The overarching goal of his work is to understand when and why consumers behave differently than they should behave (defined by an economically rational benchmark, a happiness-maximizing benchmark, or by how people think they should behave), and to develop marketing and policy interventions to improve consumers’ decision making and well-being.
Rick has published in marketing, psychology, management, neuroscience, and economics journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Annual Review of Psychology, and Neuron. His research has been covered by media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and Harvard Business Review. At Ross, he has won awards for both research and teaching.
He is the author of Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships, published in 2024 by St. Martin’s Press.
Retail Therapy
Why we shop—and what it means when we do
Rick has published in marketing, psychology, management, neuroscience, and economics journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Annual Review of Psychology, and Neuron. His research has been covered by media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and Harvard Business Review. At Ross, he has won awards for both research and teaching.
He is the author of Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships, published in January 2024 by St. Martin’s Press.
Retail Therapy
Why we shop—and what it means when we do