Eleanor Putnam-Farr

Nell Putnam-Farr is an assistant professor of marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Her research focuses primarily on how framing and contextual cues impact decision making and satisfaction. Within this domain, she considers how framing might have different effects on immediate decisions versus long term satisfaction and persistence, how contextual clues impact expectations and satisfaction, and how intercepting people at the “right” point in the decision process can impact attention and behavior. She works with company partners in the consumer packaged goods, wellness, and financial services sectors, focusing on how to improve financial and physical well-being. She relies on a combination of lab and field experiments – usually testing in the field with a corporate or non-profit partners and then working to determine a mechanism and/or boundary conditions in the lab.

Before coming to the Jones School, Nell spent three years doing research with company partners at the Yale Center for Customer Insights. She received her MBA and PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA with Honors in Economics from Williams College. Before coming to academia, she spent eight years working in the financial services industry being fascinated and frustrated by the psychology of investing behavior.