David Bell

Professor Bell is the Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor of Marketing at Wharton and is an expert in consumer shopping behavior.
His book on ecommerce and offline retail, Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One, was published in 2014.
His current research focuses on theories and explanations for geographic variation in the performance of Internet retail startups.
Startups studied include Bonobos.com, Diapers.com, and WarbyParker.com.
Recent articles explain the effect of physical location on customer acquisition, contagion effects among co-located consumers, and the effect of preference isolation on online demand.
Other projects focused on traditional retail settings explore unplanned and impulse buying, and consumer amortization strategies for fixed shopping costs.
Previous articles explained consumer store choice among retailers with different pricing strategies, the effect of reference point formation on consumer response to promotions, and the effect of structural factors (e.g., dwelling size) on consumer shopping strategiesProfessor Bell is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, and Marketing Science.
He holds a Ph.D.
from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, an MS in Statistics from Stanford University, an MA (Honorary) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Com (1st Class Honors) and B.Com from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.