Elizabeth G. Miller

Who they are

According to the Isenberg School of Management faculty page, read on 24 October 2026, Miller holds a PhD (2003) and an MA (2001) in marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in psychology and chemistry from Cornell University (1998). She was an assistant professor of marketing at Boston College from 2003 to 2011, then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the page lists her as associate professor from 2013, with later titles including department chair and Charles D. Schewe Faculty Fellow.

Her listed research areas are consumer behaviour, consumer decision-making, health decisions, digital marketing, affect and behaviour, consumer well-being and experimental design. This page draws only on that profile and the 2005 paper's record. It does not describe her wider output.

Key papers

Miller, E. G., & Kahn, B. E. (2005). Shades of meaning: The effect of color and flavor names on consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 86-92. doi:10.1086/429602.

Key ideas

Unusual names can raise choice, under conditions. In three experiments with undergraduates, ambiguous colour and flavour names were preferred to plain ones for sweaters and jellybeans, the preference disappeared under distraction, and showing a swatch before the name lowered satisfaction with ambiguous names. The ideas are set out on the ambiguous colour names page.

Names invite a search for a reason. The authors used Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature to explain the result. See Gricean maxims.

The paper's full text sits behind a subscription, and this site has read its abstract record and a Knowledge at Wharton summary. It has not read the experiments in full.

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