Neeru Paharia is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series  Neeru Paharia, associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, will give a public lecture on March 9 at 5 p.m. at W&L.

By Connie Okeke '23
January 26, 2022

Neeru Paharia, associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, will give a public lecture on March 9 at 5 p.m. as part of Washington and Lee University’s Mudd Center for Ethics series on “Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World.”

Paharia’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “The Ethics of Consumer Choice.” The event will take place in Stackhouse Theater, and tickets are not required. The lecture will also be available to view via Livestream here.

“Neeru Paharia’s work addresses the gap between consumers’ moral intentions and their actual consumption practices,” said Karla Murdock, director of the Mudd Center. “By understanding flaws in the decision-making processes that influence our purchasing behavior, we may be able to make choices that more effectively express our most important values.”

Paharia’s research papers have been published in the Journal of Marketing and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Two of her papers were finalists for The Journal of Consumer Research Best Paper Award: “The Underdog Effect: The marketing of disadvantage and determination through brand biography” and “Conspicuous consumption of time: When busyness at work and lack of leisure time become a status symbol.”

Her work has been profiled in prominent media outlets, including the New York Times, NPR’s “Morning Edition,” the “Hidden Brain” podcast and the Washington Post. She was also a member of the founding team and executive director of Creative Commons, which now has over one billion openly licensed works on the internet.

Paharia earned her master’s degree in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University and her doctorate degree in marketing from Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Paharia served as the research director for the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to Washington and Lee from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of the university. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity and The Ethics of Technology.

For more information about the rescheduled lecture and a complete schedule of events, visit the Mudd Lecture Series webpage.