Kyle B. Murray is an Associate Professor of Marketing and the Director of the School of Retailing at the Alberta School of Business. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, he was an Assistant Professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business and a Visiting Professor at INSEAD (France). He holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Marketing and Psychology from the University of Alberta.

Professor Murray's research focuses on consumer judgment and decision making, with an emphasis on how consumers make choices in electronic environments. His work in this area has been published in variety of academic journals including, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes. The results of his research have also been featured in a number of book chapters and newspaper articles. As an educator Dr. Murray has developed and taught undergraduate, MBA, PhD and executive level courses in marketing, consumer behaviour, retailing and e-commerce. He has also consulted for a number of organizations including the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, Canadian Petroleum Institute, General Motors, Greater Edmonton Foundation, Industry Canada, Microsoft and Wolseley. Dr. Murray sits on advisory boards for Colloquy, Leger Marketing and the Edmonton Opera. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Online Consumer Studies.

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    Overview of Research Projects

    Dr. Murray's research currently includes a variety of projects examining consumer judgement and decision making:

    • The Human Capital project aims to improve our understanding of how learning -- and in particular skill acquisition -- affect consumer choice. This project has examined the impact that habit and skill-acquisition have on both utilitarian tasks (e.g., online information search) and hedonic activities (e.g., playing video games).
    • The Assistive Consumer Technology (ACT) project examines consumers' interactions with technologies designed to assist their decision making. This work aims to apply current research in judgment and decision making to the development and implementation of personalized shopping environments and tools for consumer decision assistance.
      • The ACT project includes research into the psychology underlying how people give and take advice; whether that advice comes from humans or machines.
    • The Psychology of Pricing project investigates how consumers respond to pricing information. This research is currently examining how people estimate product prices, how they choose between sequences of prices and how they respond to price spikes.

    • The Self-Regulation project is building and testing an information processing model of consumer self-regulation. In particular, we are interested in understanding how people can be more successful in exercising self-control and managing their current behavior in a manner that is consistent with their long-term goals. This research is specifically interested in eating behavior in the context of growing concern over the global obesity epidemic.
    • The Retail Atmospherics project explores the impact that the shopping environment and store design elements have on consumer decision making. This research is focused on the effects of lighting, music, scent and color.

    Click here for published articles