RESEARCH

 Christensen, Katherine L. and Suzanne B. Shu (2024), "The Role of Heritage Connection in Consumer Valuation," Journal of Marketing Research, 61 (3), 571–586, Ostrom Workshop Open Access Grant

• This paper explores the "heritage discount," whereby sellers of sentimental goods accept lower prices from buyers who share a connection to the item's past. Sellers accept less when they believe the buyer will “keep the story alive.”
• Heritage connection can boost product longevity, reduce waste, and deepen loyalty. Think vintage fashion, family heirloom storytelling, or Airbnb’s "heritage travel." 
• Our research has implications for markets built on memory (self-storage, the housing market, and collectibles as noted in The Washington Post and JMR Scholarly Insights). Framing natural resources as shared heritage may also increase public support for preservation.

Christensen, Katherine L., Hal E. Hershfield, and Sam B. Maglio (2024), "Back to the Present: How Mental Time Travel Affects Perceptions of Similarity over Time and Saving Behavior,"  Journal of Consumer Research, 51 (4), 761–774

• Connection across time predicts long-term oriented decision-making. A series of studies shows that mentally traveling from the future to the present, rather than from the present to the future, can increase perceived similarity between selves across time by reducing uncertainty about the destination self. Featured in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.

David Dolifka, Katherine L. Christensen, and Franklin Shaddy, “Highlighting Opportunities (Versus Outcomes) Increases Support for Economic Redistribution,” (2025), Social Psychological and Personality Science, 16 (4), 422-432, 

• In this project, we find that disconnecting people from the past (outcomes) and shifting focus to the future (opportunities) increases support for taxes and charitable giving. 

Joint with M. Keith Chen, Elicia John, Emily Owens, and Yilin Zhuo (2025), "Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence," in press, equal authorship, Review of Economics and Statistics, 107 (6), 1734–1742, Arnold Ventures Open Access Grant,  https://shorturl.at/sr4ZE

• Cities are fragmented. Using smartphone-based geospatial data, this paper maps how police officers move across 21 of America's largest cities while on patrol, where they spend their time, and how those patterns predict the decisions they make. The analyses control for crime, income, education, and social capital.