Priya Raghubir

Priya Raghubir

Marketing researcher whose 2008 "Monopoly money" studies showed that the form a payment takes changes how much people spend.

Who they are

Raghubir is listed by NYU Stern as Professor of Marketing and Dean Abraham L. Gitlow Professor of Business. In 2008 she and Joydeep Srivastava published four studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied under the title "Monopoly money".

The first found people willing to spend more when a credit card logo was present than when it was absent. The second found the gap shrank when people estimated their expenses item by item rather than as one sum. The third and fourth removed the card altogether: people spent more with scrip than with cash of the same face value, and a gap between cash and gift certificates shrank when the differences between them were made more obvious. The studies show that the effect does not depend on plastic.

Key papers

Raghubir, P., & Srivastava, J. (2008). "Monopoly money: the effect of payment coupling and form on spending behavior." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14(3), 213-225. doi:10.1037/1076-898X.14.3.213.

Key ideas

See The Pain of Paying.

Sources

  1. Raghubir and Srivastava (2008), abstract read (Europe PMC, PMID 18808275), 12 October 2026.
  2. NYU Stern faculty page, read 12 October 2026.