Email | Personal Website
Education
BA (Honors), Linguistics, University of Minnesota
BS (Honors), Economics, University of Minnesota
Background
Prior to pursuing her doctoral degree, Akshina completed a Bachelor in Science and a Bachelor in Arts at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. During her undergraduate program, she visited the Booth Business School as a summer Research Professional and worked with the faculty of the Behavioral Marketing program. That is when she got interested in the field of consumer behavior and decided to pursue it through the lens of both her undergraduate majors linguistics and economics.
Research Interests
Akshina's research interests are interdisciplinary, with overlaps in marketing, linguistics, economics, and psychology.
Most of Akshina's research focuses on linguistic influence on consumer decision-making, mental accounting, and hierarchical choices.
Under linguistic influence on consumer decision-making, Akshina has worked on understanding the psychology behind when and how differences in verb tense usage (in a language) impacts people's intertemporal choices. She has also done a broad overview of the linguistic and psychological factors that impact greater engagement in online headlines, using a massive A/B test dataset. She is currently investigating the impact of adding a foreign language to product descriptions on foreign food evaluations, and is also looking at the language of effective apologies. Also, she is involved in a project that investigates the existence and effectiveness of apologies in the language of customer reviews, using Natural Language Processing.
Under mental accounting, Akshina is working on how emotions impact the differences in mental accounting of present versus past costs, and she is also investigating the properties of related, ancillary accounts for given primary mental accounts.
Under hierarchical choices, Akshina is working on if the desire for variety changes throughout a decision process when choices require navigating through multiple hierarchical levels of a search (i.e., from superordinate to subordinate categories).
Selected Publications
Banerjee, A. & Urminsky, O. (2021, WP) "The Language That Drives Engagement: A Systematic Large-Scale Analysis of Headline Experiments." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3770366
Banerjee, A., & Urminsky, O. (2020, WP). "What You Are Getting and What You Will Be Getting: Testing Whether Verb Tense Affects Intertemporal Choices." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3698127
Selected Presentations
Banerjee, A. & Urminsky, O. (2021, April) "The Language That Drives Engagement: A Systematic Large-Scale Analysis of Headline Experiments." Paper presented at Haring Symposium, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
Banerjee, A. & Urminsky, O. (2020, March). "Impact of Foreign Language on Food Evaluation and Choice." Paper presented at the Society for Consumer Psychology, Huntington Beach, CA.
Banerjee, A., & Urminsky, O. (2017, October). "What You Are Getting and What You Will Be Getting: Testing Whether Verb Tense Affects Intertemporal Choices." Paper presented at the Association for Consumer Research. San Diego, CA.