Yan Vieites, an administration PhD student at the FGV´s Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (FGV EBAPE), has won a prize from the ACR/Sheth Foundation for his dissertation, titled “Your need does not appeal to me. How social class shapes charitable giving across causes.” This is the first time that a student at a Latin American institution has won this prize, which is awarded annually to recognize and encourage research on marketing and consumer behavior.

In his dissertation, Vieites discusses the behavior of people in different social classes in relation to charitable giving. He found that people with greater spending power tend to direct their donations to less basic needs, such as esthetic or cultural causes, while less wealthy people focus on more urgent causes, such as fighting hunger or poverty.

The Association for Consumer Research (ACR) was founded in 1969 by a small group of consumer behavior researchers, whose informal meetings at Ohio State University led to the creation of an annual conference dedicated to the study of consumer behavior. Today, ACR’s mission is to promote research in this field and facilitate the sharing of academic information between academics, the private sector and governments across the world.