Susan Mantel
Associate Professor of Marketing
"The research environment here at Kelley Indianapolis exceptional and extremely conducive to collaboration, which in turn, encourages interesting cross-disciplinary research."
Joining Kelley Indianapolis in 2003 after 10 years at the University of Toledo, Susan Mantel focuses her research projects on the study of human decision making and the understanding of how the "people" element influences buying decisions and behaviors. Specifically, her areas of interest include consumer information processing; influences of affect on consumer responses, judgment and inference processes; decision making in a sales setting; and marketing and sales strategy.
Most recently, Mantel's paper, "A Behavioral Study of Supply Manager Decision-Making: Factors Influencing Make vs. Buy Evaluation," co-authored with fellow Kelley faculty member, Mohan Tatikonda, was named the top research paper published in 2006 by The Journal of Operations Management. The two spent more than a year studying the behavioral factors influencing supply managers' decisions to insource or outsource the making of product components. Novel in the field of operations management, the research method involved an experiment embedded in a survey distributed to more than 1,000 supply chain managers.
"Although the decision to make or buy is often attributed directly to the company, in nearly every case, an individual – usually the supply chain manager – is the one who actually makes the decision," explains Mantel. "It's here where personal bias – the human side – enters the equation. Companies can often improve their decision making processes when they understand that these biases exist and that decisions are based on more than 'just the facts.'"
In addition, Mantel has also worked with colleagues Dena and Tony Cox to study the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising, investigating how consumers process risk information. She has also explored how positive mood affects an individual's responses to ethical questions in a sales setting. Prior to her career in academia, Mantel worked for a decade in the field of market research.
