James R. Bettman is Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration at the
Fuqua School of Business and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Prior to his appointment at Duke he taught at the UCLA Graduate School of Management. He received both his BA (mathematics-economics) and his PhD (administrative sciences) from Yale University. His teaching interests are in consumer behavior. His research focuses on consumer information processing and decision making, particularly constructive preferences, how decision makers adapt to different situations, effects of emotion and stress on decision making, the role of nonconscious processes in consumer behavior, and how people use consumption in forming identities.
Professor Bettman's publications include two books, An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice and The Adaptive Decision Maker, and a monograph, Emotional Decisions: Tradeoff Difficulty and Coping in Consumer Choice. His research papers appear in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Neuron, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Management Science, among others. He is a member of the editorial review boards for the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Marketing Research and has previously served as co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and editor of Monographs of the Journal of Consumer Research. He has also served as president of the Association for Consumer Research.
Doctoral education has also been a focus for Professor Bettman. He directs the doctoral program at the Fuqua School and also did so at UCLA. He has been the chair or co-chair for thirty-nine doctoral students in marketing. He has also chaired the American Marketing Association Doctoral Dissertation Awards competition and was one of the organizers for the 1985 American Marketing Association Doctoral Consortium held at Duke. He was awarded the Duke University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2006.
Professor Bettman received the NCNB Faculty Award for the Fuqua School, was named
the Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year, and received a teaching award at UCLA. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Association for Consumer Research. He has received the Harold Maynard Award, the Paul D. Converse Award for contributions to marketing theory and thought, was named the AMA/Irwin/McGraw-Hill Marketing Educator of the Year by the American Marketing Association, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group, received the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology, was awarded the Leo Melamed Prize for outstanding scholarship by business school faculty, and was named a highly cited researcher in Economics/Business by ISI Web of Science.
Included among Professor Bettman's consulting and professional experiences are
testimony on proposed trade rules before the Federal Trade Commission, work with
various corporations on consumer confusion and trademark infringement cases, work on
designing internet shopping aids to help consumers make better decisions, and advice to
the US Court, Central District of California, regarding possible remedies for unfair
competition in the trading stamp industry.