Dr. Lukas Maier presented his recent work at this year’s Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP) Annual Conference in Las Vegas.The SCP Annual Conference is one of the leading academic international conferences in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior.

For the paper “Disclosing Disability: Consumer Reactions to Disability-Owned Businesses,” Lukas (together with his co-author Rishad Habib) received this year’s Best Paper Conference Theme Award. The conference theme, “Amplifying our Impact to Enhance Consumers’ Lives,” emphasized providing helpful and important insights to those outside our academic bubble. Lukas and Rishad’s work focuses on disabled entrepreneurs and investigates how disclosing disability in the marketplace influences consumer judgments about the focal brand and its products. While extant literature shows that disabled people often suffer from serious discrimination and negative stereotyping, they find that disclosing disability to consumers may hold valuable marketing potential. A series of field and online experiments shows that consumers associate disability with morality: they view disability-owned businesses as moral actors providing benefits to society. These societal benefits beliefs in turn lead to several important downstream consequences such as increased product sales, higher click-through rates on social media, higher willingness-to-pay, and product choices in incentive-compatible experiments.

It's great to see our work being recognized for its potential to positively impact people’s lives and hope it will actually do so.

We warmly congratulate Lukas and Rishad on their award!