Dan Rice
Associate Professor Louisiana State University
- Baton Rouge LA
Dr. Rice utilizes theory to generate impactful insights into consumer response.
Areas of Expertise
Research Focus
Consumer Psychology & Price Fairness
Dr. Rice’s research focuses on consumer psychology—brand attitudes, bundle evaluation, and price-fairness perceptions. As director of LSU’s Behavioral Research Lab, he pairs eye-tracking, physiological metrics, and controlled experiments to reveal how cognitive and emotional responses drive purchase decisions and inform evidence-based marketing strategy.
Education
University of Florida
Ph.D.
Marketing
2008
Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management
MBA
Business
2003
Cornell University
BSCE
Civil Environmental Engineering
1998
Accomplishments
Tiger Athletic Foundation Teaching Award
2016-2017
College of Business Nomination for Rising Scholar Research Award
2015
College of Business Nomination for Rising Scholar Research Award
2014
Media Appearances
Make the most of this shortened holiday shopping season
Louisiana Radio Network radio
2024-12-01
This year, the calendar is not on the side of retailers. Since Thanksgiving fell on the latest date possible, that leads to the shortest Christmas shopping season possible, when defined as starting the day after Christmas and ending Christmas Eve. LSU Marketing Professor Dan Rice says retailers started their Black Friday deals early this year, as they’ve done in years past.
“They’re getting into that idea of the shopping season’s coming up we’re going to give you these ideas early, and if you don’t get those, you’ll get some next week.”
Want to tinsel-up your home on the cheap? Here's how to find deals on holiday decorations
USA Today online
2023-11-20
But it’s not too late to get your holiday decor at a good price, said Dan Rice, an associate professor of marketing at Louisiana State University.
While those 50% off sales look good, there are ways to tell whether they really are a good deal.
“In my mind, it’s never too early to get a good price on holiday decor, but a few things are necessary to know if it’s a ‘good price,’” said Rice, who specializes in consumer behavior.
LSU officials on lookout for new '.sucks' web domains to protect university's brand
The Advocate online
2015-05-23
Dan Rice, an assistant professor in LSU’s Marketing Department, said buying a site with a negative name gives companies more control of their brands.
A business can redirect traffic to a more positive site, such as its home page or an awards page, Rice said. Buying a negative domain name also means a company can keep that website from becoming the place where people go to complain.
Articles
The effects of transaction methods on perceived contamination and attitude toward retailers
Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice2022
Advancing technology and increasing demand for contactless purchase methods have encouraged retailers to integrate technology into the point-of sale experience. However, limited research explores how consumers perceive contactless payment technology compared with traditional payment methods. Two experiments demonstrate that contactless payment methods, when compared with traditional, contact forms of payments such as cash and credit card transactions, are perceived as less contaminated. Additionally, consumers using contactless payment technology hold more favorable attitudes toward the retailer. However, the benefits derived from using contactless payments are negated for retailers whose customers expect to use contaminated methods of payment, such as cash.
I guess that is fair: How the efforts of other customers influence buyer price fairness perceptions
Psychology & Marketing2019
Past research has demonstrated that consumers' price fairness judgments are influenced by comparisons between the offer price they receive and the prices paid by other consumers for the same product offering. In today's digital age, reference points for purchases are more prevalent than ever. However, investigations on how certain inputs of the transaction affect these judgments is lacking. Specifically, extant research has failed to account for how the purchase efforts of other consumers can influence one's own price fairness evaluations. Moreover, relatively little empirical research has endeavored to understand the simultaneous cognitive and affective processes that explain how consumers arrive at price fairness judgments. To address these gaps in the literature, we introduce two studies aimed at understanding the process through which the salient efforts of referent consumers serve to mitigate perceptions of price unfairness when two customers pay different prices for the same product. The findings support a dual-process model whereby the efforts of other (referent) customers serve to simultaneously reduce buyer anger and increase buyer understanding of the price disparity, ultimately mitigating perceptions of price unfairness.
The impact of bundle comparisons on bundle preference
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making2018
The bundling literature largely holds that a person's reaction to a given product bundle depends only on the characteristics of the products contained in the bundle. This paper, instead, proposes that people evaluate bundles in reference to other bundles that they have seen. Prior research indicates that people are sensitive to a bundle's “attribute inventory” or the aggregate level of comparable attributes possessed by its constituent products. We show that when people evaluate a bundle, they compare the attribute inventories that it offers to those offered by other bundles that they have seen. The resulting compositional comparisons can occur without changes to the products that comprise the target and contextual bundles, vary by attribute comparability and attentional focus, and coexist with (and at times reverse the effects of) well-established product-specific context effects, which are determined solely by the products and their attributes.
Understanding how goal‐striving, goal orientation, and shame influence self‐perceptions after exposure to models in advertising
Psychology & Marketing2017
Marketers frequently use advertisements featuring thin models to promote the goal of self-improvement to consumers. However, many of these appeals lead to detrimental effects on the self-perceptions of the females who view them. This paper integrates components of goal-striving theory and social comparison theory to explain consumer response to these advertisements and investigates how goal attainability may mitigate the negative effects of these ads. Additionally, this work investigates how a promotion-focus goal orientation moderates the effects of the goal-striving process and provides evidence of the mediating effects of shame. Finally, this work addresses a gap in the literature by examining how the interplay of model size and goal attainability impacts male consumers’ self-perceptions. Study 1 reveals that high levels of perceived goal attainability mitigate the negative effects of exposure to thin models on self-perceptions for females. Study 2 demonstrates that a high promotion-focus goal orientation can lead to more favorable self-perceptions for female participants exposed to a thin model with attainable goals, but it does not isolate participants from feelings of shame, which mediates the effects of goal attainability on self-perceptions. Study 3 reveals similar findings for male consumers, but notably finds that shame does not play a significant role in understanding the comparison process for male consumers, suggesting key differences in the comparison processes between sexes.
How fitting! The influence of fence-context fit on price discrimination fairness
Journal of Business Research2016
Price discrimination fairness research demonstrates that the level of familiarity consumers have with a price discrimination tactic influences their fairness judgments. In this paper, the authors empirically demonstrate that these findings are not universal. Specifically, the findings indicate that the fit between the (a) variables upon which the price discrimination tactic focuses and (b) the decision criteria by which products or services offered by the firm are judged (i.e., fence-context fit) moderates the impact of the familiarity on price discrimination fairness judgments. Two experiments examine how the factors of fence-context fit and familiarity lead to different price discrimination fairness judgments and provide process evidence of a critical affective component of consumer response to price discrimination tactics based on suspicion. The findings provide implications for managers to carefully consider price discrimination policies by taking adequate precautions in an effort to reduce perceptions of unfairness.
Research Grants
Louisiana State University College of Business Research Lab Mobility and Measurement Enhancement
Louisiana Board of Regents
2015
Faculty Travel Grant
Office of Research and Economic Development
2015
Louisiana State University College of Business Faculty/Ph.D. Research Lab
Louisiana Board Of Regents
2012
Should We Hire David Beckham To Endorse Our Brand
SU Council on Research
2010
Media
