Student Biographies

I am a 2006 National Taiwan University graduate with a bachelor degree in Business Administration. Following business school, I worked as a research assistant under two sociology professors in Academic Sinica in Taipei, where I was involved in research activities that investigated the association of IQ test score gap and socioeconomic inequality, institutional effects on disparities in students’ academic performance, and the trends in mathematics and science performance across nations. Since 2008 I’ve been working towards a Master’s degree under the Consumer Science Department at UW-Madison with an aim to advance my research ability and contribute to the studies of welfare and poor families. Currently I do not have a specific thesis topic, but my research interests primarily include (1) effects of social policy on economic well-beings of single-parent families and (2) differences in consumption patterns across economically vulnerable families.

I grew up in the American Midwest. I have lived in 18 towns, villages, and cities across Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Wisconsin. Through a childhood spent as “the new kid,” I gained an objective perspective on human behavior and an interest in the functioning of our social system. I am fascinated by the ways in which individuals interact with each other and with society as a whole through their consumption habits. My current research interest is focused on food consumption. I am interested in alternative foods, why people choose to consume them, and the impact of those choices on the individual and the marketplace. In my spare time, I enjoy SCUBA diving, playing wiffleball, cooking, watching movies, and playing computer games.

I am interested in family economics and financial planning, with a focus on issues of special interest and impact to women. I am pursuing a Masters degree in Consumer Science and Family Economics on a part-time basis. My ultimate goal is to be in a position to educate people about financial issues, especially to help women understand decisions about managing their personal finances and making choices that impact the economic welfare of the family. I hope to reach people through classroom instruction or through community-based work. When I am not in school or at work, I enjoy spending time in southwestern Wisconsin with my family and friends.

Area of interest: Motivation and consumption; pathologies of maladaptive patterns of consumption; the economic/consumption behaviors of emerging adults. People and their behavior interest me. I majored in math and economics—I would have chosen psychology instead of economics but I was one course closer to completing the major in economics. While finishing my BA I searched for graduate programs that would sweep across disciplinary boundaries in the study of human behavior: I found the MA in QMSS at Columbia. My advisor was a demographer and I ended up writing my thesis on the early life experiences and the transition to adulthood. The program was a terminal degree and it seemed that most PhD programs required depth at the expense of breadth. At that point I took some time to study for rabbinic ordination which I received. After considering employment opportunities I came across the CBFE degree at UW. My interests in economics and psychology correlate, roughly, with the two degree tracks. Recently I have been studying the literature that connects basic human needs with patterns in consumption—particularly how when these needs are unmet then maladaptive patterns of consumption emerge. This relates to my work on emerging adulthood as this is a particularly sensitive period of development. This follows the increased popularity of “materialism” research. I do not have specific expectations professionally, though I expect that at least part of my work would involve trying to improve people's lives

My research interests include applied microeconomics and policy analysis on issues related to vulnerable populations (such as single mothers with children, people with disabilities etc.). In applied microeconomics, I am interested in an array of topics including strategic pricing, innovation and consumer loyalty. As for policy analysis, I am currently researching the work incentive effect of the Earned Income Tax Credits program on working-age people with disabilities. My other interests include field experiments in economics, mathematical sociology (social networks and social dynamic processes), and amateurish photographing.

My family immigrated from South Korea when I was 8 years old. I have been fortunate enough to travel to Korea as well as many other countries while growing up, and through these experiences, I have naturally developed an interest in cultural similarities and differences. Of course, shopping has been one of my favorite hobbies since I was very young, so the field of consumer behavior just seemed to be the perfect path for me. I am particularly interested in the social-cultural motivations for consumption such as peer pressure, reference group expectations, social identity, and conspicuous consumption, and I found that migration to another country is an excellent cross-section to observe how the social environment affects and changes social consumption behavior. Hence, my current research is on whether international student communities encourage higher amounts of conspicuous consumption compared to students in their country-of-origin, immigrant students, and American students. In the future, I would like to work in marketing research and continue into a PhD. In my free time, I like to shop, play the piano, and watch Korean soap operas.

I majored in Consumer Science at UW-Madison in 2005. My emphasis was in Consumer Affairs, but I was primarily interested in studying Consumer Rights. I chose to pursue my graduate education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently a M.S. student in the Department of Consumer Science, my research is in the field of Water Cooperatives. I continue to work for the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives in a study on the Economic Impact of Cooperatives in the United States (2007-present). My contribution to the work includes compiling a comprehensive list of water cooperatives in the United States and surveying and interviewing water cooperative businesses across the United States. My research focuses on water cooperatives in the U.S., but my main goal is to incorporate the research on a global scale, which includes the complexity of water issues challenging managers, environmentalists and human rights activists.

I will describe myself as a traveler, since I've lived in different cities in China and the U.S. since I was born. The curiosity to explore new things that developed from my gravels has influenced my academic interests. In my first semester here, I finished a project concerning online purchasing behavior, which was inspired by my personal experience as a heavy e-shopper. As I explored the field of consumer behavior further, I gradually found that what I feel most comfortable with and excited about is to predict and forecast behavior with known information. Ambitious as it seems, I've taken my first step: Last semester, I researched how to relate real consumption with measures from consumer confidence data, at both the macro and micro levels. Results showed that consumer confidence can be a well-performed indicator of real consumption. Right now I will continue to study this topic as well as assist Professor Zepeda in researching organic food consumption.

Area of interest: Ethical, environmental, or health conscious consumption; consumer cooperative; consumers' civic engagement. Volunteering at an organic farming community my freshman year first introduced me to consumption issues. I was impressed by the consumer co-op movement which played an important role in the growth of organic farming in Korea. I realized that consumption had the power to change the way products were produced. Throughout my undergraduate years, I participated in various activities on ‘Green Consumption’. After graduation, I worked as a magazine reporter at the Korean Research Institute for Cooperatives. It was a good opportunity to explore cooperative businesses and organizations. Since I loved writing and wanted to be a good writer who was able to bridge theory and practice, I began my graduate study. While working on my master's thesis - “An ethnographic case study on students’ participation in university cooperatives” - I endeavored to learn both quantitative research methods and qualitative ones. After my master's coursework I worked as an executive staff and research assistant of the Korean Institute for Consumer Education for two years. Since I hoped to explore my field of interest in an international setting beyond my country, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. at the UW-Madison in the USA. Now, I’m enjoying learning and researching in this new environment. I hope that I can continue to progress so to produce useful knowledge in my fields.

I got my Bachelor Degree in Psychology from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. My research interest is generally in the areas of consumer behavior, culture, and urban lifestyle. Having been raised in Jakarta, one of the major cities in Asia, I am always interested in the consumption behavior of urban people. In big cities, people are privileged with many facilities that cannot be found in smaller cities. Urban people also enjoy the plethora of consumer goods and service, in which they could spend their money, sometimes beyond the necessities. Shopping becomes an alternative to spend leisure time. When I was in college, I got an opportunity to help my instructor in conducting qualitative study on a traditional fishermen community in Jakarta. The experience gave me an insight that the tendency of shopping beyond what someone actually needs does not only occur to people with high income, but also to people with limited income. I am currently working on my Master thesis, investigating how people with different economic resources and educational attainments spend their leisure time. While attending UW-Madison, I learn a lot about research method as well as being introduced to a lot of literatures on consumer behavior and lifestyle, which I hope would help me in my future career. My career aspiration is to be a researcher, either in an academic or industrial context.

I always wanted to combine my research interest in financial planning and individual behavior together. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in finance in 2008, I chose the CB&FE graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because of its diversity and emphasis on human well-being. I'm assisting in a program studying influence of financial coaching services on financial behavior of low-income families. Our research interest includes how goal-setting contributes to financial behavior improvement and what demographic factors may affect research result.

I am interested in personal and family finance. Research in this area could have inestimable value and great impact on human’s life. First, consumption is an essential part of life for every person and family. Second, we are living in an age of commodity explosion. There is a learning curve for most consumers to behave in a way they feel is the most comfortable. For each consumer, how to act in this ever-changing market and how to bring the maximum benefit to a person or a family by using limited resource is especially important. These are reasons why I would like to dig more into this field in which employment is my career aspiration. My career plan is to be a personal and family financial consultant.

I love traveling, and I am deeply amazed by the variety of fabulous cultures on this earth. However, growing up in a traditional Chinese family, my interests in cultures come from my experiences living abroad in Japan, India and the United States. The intrigue of culture and my economics background brought me to UW-Madison to study consumer behavior, which allows me to examine people's choices in a cross-cultural context. My master thesis is an exploration of the influence of cultural values and credit card use on impulsive consumption. I build a model that incorporates both culture values and credit card use as the independent variables for impulsive consumption. I plan to conduct an online survey with UW students to test my hypothesis that culture serves as moderator for the relationship between credit card use and impulsive consumption. Being the teaching assistant of the course "Healthcare Issues for Individuals, Families and Society", I am also intrigued by the complexity of healthcare industry. I hope to explore this topic, particularly to investigate the diversified costumer body also from cross-cultural perspectives.