Gillian Ku

Gillian Ku

Gillian Ku is a researcher in organisational behaviour and the first author of the 2005 paper that proposed a competitive arousal model of auction fever, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She is listed at London Business School on the 2019 paper on the unrecognised effects of incidental arousal in auctions.

Who they are

Ku studies decision-making in competitive settings, with auctions as the main setting. The 2005 paper was written with Deepak Malhotra and J. Keith Murnighan. This page records the published work and does not go beyond it.

Key papers

  • Ku, G., Malhotra, D., & Murnighan, J. K. (2005). Towards a competitive arousal model of decision-making: A study of auction fever in live and Internet auctions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 96(2), 89-103. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2004.10.001
  • Adam, M. T. P., Ku, G., & Lux, E. (2019). Auction fever: The unrecognized effects of incidental arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 80, 52-58. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.009

Key ideas

The 2005 model proposes that rivalry, time pressure and an audience raise arousal in an auction, and that arousal can impair calm, careful decision-making and push bidders past their limits. The 2019 paper asked whether arousal from outside the auction also raises bids. Across three experiments it did, and in the third bidders did not mention their emotions or the arousing task when asked what had shaped their bids. See Competitive Arousal and Emotional Arousal.

Sources

  1. Ku, G., Malhotra, D., & Murnighan, J. K. (2005). Towards a competitive arousal model of decision-making: A study of auction fever in live and Internet auctions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 96(2), 89-103. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2004.10.001
  2. Adam, M. T. P., Ku, G., & Lux, E. (2019). Auction fever: The unrecognized effects of incidental arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 80, 52-58. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.009