Itamar Simonson

Simonson has received many awards for his research, including Honorary Doctorate: University of Paris II – Sorbonne Universities, awards for the best article published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, as well as awards from the Association of Consumer Research, American Marketing Association, and the Society for Consumer Psychology. Notably, he was named a fellow of the Association for Consumer Research in 2013.

Simonson has studied both preferences that are created "on the fly" when people make choices and predetermined preference elements that reflect people's habits, predispositions, and genes. He began studying consumer choice in 1987. Simonson's doctoral dissertation introduced the notion that consumers select the options that are supported by the best reasons or justifications, rather than the options that maximize utility. He demonstrated the "compromise effect", whereby consumers often select the middle or, alternatively, an "extreme" option in a set regardless of its real values. Consumers often rely on a comparison with the options they encounter, and "compromise" because it is the easiest to justify and least likely to be criticized. He also showed how consumers use irrelevant product features to determine an option's attractiveness. For example, offering consumers a product "bonus" (e.g., getting the option to pay for a collector's plate when buying a product) that many regard as unneeded leads consumers to reject that brand and prefer a competing option.

He received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the Hebrew University in 1976, his MBA from the UCLA School of Management in 1978 and his PhD in Marketing from Duke University in 1987.