Margaret Campbell

Study Finds Moral Costs in Over-pricing for Essentials

ilseu — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:21:48 +0000

Study Finds Moral Costs in Over-pricing for Essentials ilseu Tue, 11/04/2025 - 14:21 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | UCR News November 05, 2025

When companies hike prices on essentials like food, medicine, or medical devices, the financial rewards may be immediate—but the reputational damage may linger and ultimately cost more in the long run.

Margaret "Meg" C. Campbell

That’s the finding of a study led by UC Riverside School of Business professor Margaret C. Campbell. Consumers, the research shows, judge prices for essential goods and services not just through the lens of supply and demand, but also through their sense of morality.

“If companies are perceived as taking advantage of vulnerable people—like the elderly or the uninsured—they may make short-term profits but suffer long-term damage to their brand,” said Campbell, an associate dean, chair of the marketing department, and Anderson Presidential Chair.

“People stop wanting to do business with companies they see as acting unfairly,” she said.

The study, however, also found this moral judgment doesn’t apply to goods and services seen as non-essential for consumers. If not being able to afford the product doesn’t cause harm, fairness isn’t a real concern.

Published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Campbell’s study introduces what she and her co-authors call the “moral harm model of price fairness.” Drawing on eight controlled experiments with more than 3,000 participants, the researchers examined how people perceive price fairness not just economically, but ethically.

Their findings suggest a simple price tag can provoke complex reactions—especially when the product is important for consumer well-being.

“We found that consumers perceive harm when prices restrict access to a necessary product,” Campbell said. “And when people perceive harm, they judge the pricing as immoral—even if the price follows basic supply and demand.”

For instance, a high price on hearing aids can be seen as far more unfair than a similar price on diamond earrings. The difference? Hearing aids are often necessary for basic functioning and social connection, whereas forgoing jewelry doesn’t cause harm.

To quantify the hidden costs of high prices for essential products or to vulnerable consumers, the research team developed a novel metric called “inferred harm.” This measure captures the psychological and welfare loss consumers infer from a price perceived as unfair.

The study also found that consumers perceive unfairness not just in price hikes, but in static pricing when production costs fall. Companies were often seen as acting immorally by failing to lower prices when they could.

In one experiment, participants were told about prices for eyeglasses. When they learned that a firm providing glasses kept the same prices when their costs decreased, many participants thought this pricing was unfair.

“People think it is unfair to keep the same price when costs decrease for products like eyeglasses that are important for consumer well-being because the firm could afford to charge a lower price,” Campbell said.

A follow-up experiment found that participants perceived the optometry firm’s decision to keep prices the same—despite reduced production costs—as even more harmful when the firm served financially vulnerable customers in a low-income community.

Another experiment placed participants in the role of retailers and found they were willing to lower prices for more vulnerable customers, even at the expense of their own profits. In yet another experiment, participants judged it fair to offer lower prices specifically to vulnerable groups—such as through senior citizen discounts—even when that meant charging higher prices to other consumers, including themselves.

The researchers argue that moral perceptions of pricing can lead to serious consequences, including reputational harm, reduced customer loyalty, and even government intervention. In some cases, legislation has been proposed in response to prices perceived as excessively high for essential goods.

“There’s a real risk for companies that ignore this,” she said. “Beyond losing customers, they may also invite regulatory scrutiny.”

Interestingly, the research also found that lowering prices on harmful or addictive goods—such as alcohol or tobacco—can backfire if seen as encouraging overuse in vulnerable communities.

“Promoting high-alcohol beverages in low-income neighborhoods doesn’t come across as generous,” Campbell said. “It comes across as harmful.”

Campbell said real-world controversies partly inspired the research—such as the pricing of insulin, hearing aids, and the EpiPen, a medical device used to treat life-threatening allergic reactions. The pharmaceutical company Mylan (now part of Viatris Inc.) sparked national outrage in 2016 when it raised the price of a two-pack of EpiPens from $100 to $600.

That backlash led to congressional hearings, lawsuits, and hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements. Mylan later released a generic version at a much lower cost to quell the controversy.

Titled “Painful prices: the moral harm model of price fairness,” the study was co-authored by Justin Pomerance of the University of New Hampshire and Erin Percival Carter of the University of Maine.

So, what should companies take away from this?

“If your customers feel you’re harming people—or failing to help them when you could—they’ll turn away,” Campbell said. “Fairness is about more than numbers. It’s about values.”

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Header image: A woman discerns prices at a grocery store (Getty Images)

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Margaret Campbell

Professor Recognized for Consumer Psychology Work

ilseu — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:46:21 +0000

Professor Recognized for Consumer Psychology Work ilseu Wed, 03/13/2024 - 07:46 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | Inside UCR March 13, 2024

Margaret “Meg” C. Campbell, an associate dean, professor of marketing, and Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration at UC Riverside’s School of Business, has received the Fellows Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Consumer Psychology.

The Society for Consumer Psychology, or SCP, a top professional organization of academics and practitioners focused on consumer psychology, presented Campbell with the honor at the group’s annual conference on Saturday, March 9, in Nashville, Tenn. The Fellows Award is one of the society’s most prestigious recognitions, reserved for individuals whose work has made a lasting and meaningful impact on the field.

The award recognized Campbell for her years of scholarship, research impact, and her work with the field, SCP, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. She has been a co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology on Marketplace Morality, a co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, or JCR, and has served in leadership roles for both SCP and the Association for Consumer Research. These leadership roles have allowed her to contribute not only as a researcher but also as a mentor and guide, shaping the direction of consumer psychology research and supporting the professional development of other scholars in the field.

Campbell has made groundbreaking contributions to the literature about persuasion knowledge and price fairness. Her research has advanced understanding of how consumers evaluate marketing tactics, how they form judgments about fairness in pricing, and how these perceptions influence decision-making in the marketplace. Her published work has been widely cited, with more than 10,000 Google Scholar citations, demonstrating its influence and continued relevance across marketing, psychology, and business disciplines.

Previous honors for Campbell reflect the sustained quality and impact of her scholarship. These include the JCP 2019 Park Award Honorable Mention, the 2017 JCR Best Article Honorable Mention, and the JCR 40th Anniversary Most Impactful Paper of 2000. Each of these recognitions underscores the significance of her contributions over time, from early career achievements to her most recent work.

Campbell joined UC Riverside in 2021 and currently serves as the faculty chair of the School of Business and the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management. In these roles, she provides academic leadership and strategic direction, helping to guide the School of Business in its mission to foster innovation, inclusivity, and excellence in business education. Her experience as a scholar and leader enhances the school’s reputation and creates opportunities for students and faculty alike to engage in impactful research and applied learning.

Before arriving at UC Riverside, Campbell was the provost professor of marketing at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her academic career has included several other positions that highlight her dedication to advancing both research and education. Through these roles, she has taught and mentored countless students, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia and industry.

Campbell received a doctoral degree in business from Stanford University in 1992. That training provided the foundation for her distinguished career in consumer psychology, one that has combined rigorous scholarship with a commitment to service and leadership. The Fellows Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Consumer Psychology marks another milestone in a career defined by influence, impact, and the advancement of knowledge.

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What Is the Impact of ChatGPT on Marketing?

ilseu — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 05:58:30 +0000

What Is the Impact of ChatGPT on Marketing? ilseu Sun, 04/23/2023 - 22:58 More News Laurie McLaughlin April 21, 2023

Margaret Campbell, Chair and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, Professor of Marketing

With the eruption—and disruption—of ChatGPT in many business sectors, UCR’s Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration Margaret Campbell shares important insight into the early potential impacts, advantages, and disadvantages of this pervasive technology on the marketing field.

Campbell serves as associate dean, department chair, and a professor of marketing at the UCR School of Business. Her research is widely published and focuses on consumers as intuitive psychologists who use their knowledge to make inferences about the marketplace. She is well known for her research on consumers’ understanding of persuasion and on price fairness. Most recently, her work examines marketplace-relevant knowledge in children, studying topics including children’s responses to the use of cartoon characters on product packaging and other aspects related to health.

Campbell answers questions about ChatGPT and the marketing industry:

How does the emergence of ChatGPT impact work in the field of marketing?

I predict that this first stage will emerge with ChatGPT being used as an aid in developing ideas that humans will then further refine and develop.

The field of marketing covers a lot of ground, including jobs in brand management and strategy, pricing, product development, channels of distribution, advertising, social media, and more. ChatGPT and other advanced language models will impact each of these different types of marketing in different ways, but the one thing we can be sure of is that these AI models will impact them.

ChatGPT will be, and already is, used to answer consumer questions, develop content, provide ideas for products, generate slogans, analyze data, and more. At this point, people are trying things—basically throwing things at the ChatGPT wall, so to speak—to see what happens.

I think that the primary advantage is efficiency. ChatGPT can efficiently take in large amounts of information and use it, whether it is for language/content development or data analysis. The speed it offers is already fairly amazing.

What do you think are the disadvantages of ChatGPT for the field of marketing?

One big disadvantage I see right now is that, as I understand it, ChatGPT and similar technologies do not have any way of judging whether what it provides is correct. So, it can efficiently “answer” queries, but the answers may or may not be correct. So, for example, it would be difficult to turn over to customer service without some kind of oversight.

Another disadvantage is that ChatGPT is based on what is already there and what it is trained on. At this point, it will have a hard time being truly creative rather than derivative. Creative is novel and useful; ChatGPT is less likely to be able to achieve this.

One more important disadvantage is that we do not yet know what pricing will be applied to these new tools. Right now, they are free because we are all being used as beta testers, but, of course, there will need to be some way to pay. That will certainly impact the “efficiency.”

There are also a variety of ethical concerns. Key among those for marketing are ownership, privacy, and biases. For example, who owns what is created by ChatGPT? If a brand slogan is output from ChatGPT, does the brand own it? What about patents?

Are any existing positions in the field of marketing at risk of being replaced, and what kinds of positions might be created as a result of ChatGPT and future related technologies?

Given what we are currently seeing, I think that the positions in marketing at most risk of impact, including replacement, by ChatGPT and related technologies are those that are language based, visually based, or data analytic.

For example, I think that copywriting, whether for print, commercials, or social media, is at real risk from ChatGPT. It is not that I think that all human copywriting will be replaced, but that the number of copywriters needed will decrease as ChatGPT and related technologies are used to assist in the creation of content. A human copywriter can prompt various ways to get fairly well-written copy and then tweak/edit it to be even better for the topic at hand and desired voice. Similarly, I think that some jobs in public relations will be impacted. The same risk exists for artists and designers from tools, such as Midjourney, which can provide visuals quickly and efficiently.

It is much harder to predict what positions will be created. However, to this point, with each technological advance, humans have figured out other things to do when technology eliminates the need for some jobs. My hope is that the efficiencies created by AI technologies will enable all humans to use their ingenuity in other ways.

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Read an article by Prof. Rich Yueh about possible impacts on the field of information systems:

ChatGPT and Information Systems

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Margaret Campbell

ChatGPT

Curiosity Is Key to Understanding Consumers

ilseu — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 23:27:21 +0000

Curiosity Is Key to Understanding Consumers ilseu Tue, 08/24/2021 - 16:27 More News By Darin Estep August 25, 2021

Margaret Campbell, Ph.D., has explored and explained consumer behavior around the globe—in France, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, Canada and many points in between—and across the United States.

So, when she arrived at UCR this summer as a professor of marketing and Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration, it was a homecoming of sorts. Campbell and her family lived in California until 2000, when she departed UCLA to join the faculty at Leeds School of Business in Boulder, Colorado.

This fall she is sharing her perspectives on advertising and marketing with undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Business. Her expectation of students is deceptively simple: “Be curious.”

That’s vital in today’s fast-changing, consumer-driven marketplace—and a worthwhile reminder for the business side as well as the academic side of marketing, she says.

“When companies and managers get caught up in creating a cool product, sometimes they forget the reality check to make sure what they are doing is creating value for consumers,” she adds, and the same thing can happen in academics.

This was a point she emphasized during her term as an editor for the Journal of Consumer Research. She and her colleagues introduced themselves to readers with an editorial, “Our Vision for the Journal of Consumer Research: It’s All about the Consumer.”

The market-driving power of consumers extends to children, an area of recent research focus for Campbell, who examines how children learn to make healthy choices. This includes studying how their pre-existing knowledge shapes the way they view marketing, such as seeing cartoon characters on a box of cereal.

Campbell, who earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and economics and a Ph.D. in business at Stanford University, says she was drawn to UCR by its strong marketing team. She noted that the marketing program, as well as the business school and MBA program, are on upward trajectories.

Yunzeng Wang, dean of the UCR School of Business, says the respect is mutual, citing Campbell’s extensive record of publications, awards, recognitions and research.

“In the School of Business, we expect our students to understand and embrace the impact they can have on the real world,” says Wang. “Professor Campbell’s work, including her international experiences, are excellent complements to our emphasis on inclusive, global perspectives.”

Campbell says it is important to equip students with the core concepts and research tools they need to apply to the real world. But she reminds them that world is constantly changing, and they will need to keep up with it.

“Don’t just read the textbook. Seek out diverse perspectives,” Campbell says. “Whether a student or faculty member, the biggest thing is to come to class thinking about what we are discussing, and to share your own thoughts and views.”

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Margaret Campbell

Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration