David DeFranza

Assistant Professor of Marketing

University College Dublin

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University College Dublin. My research applies computational social science to understand nuanced psychological phenomena and decision-making in ecologically meaningful contexts. This involves the analysis of large-scale, real-world datasets, such as corpora of news and webpages, social media posts, or mobile phone location data, using econometric modeling, machine learning, and quasi-experimental designs.

A brief summary of my experience is provided below. For more details, please download my CV.

Publications

ORCID | Google Scholar

• DeFranza, David, Mike Lindow, Kevin Harrison, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra (2020). Religion and reactance to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines. American Psychologist, 76(5), 744-754.
• Read the pre-print of this article.
• DeFranza, David, Himanshu Mishra, & Arul Mishra (2020). How language shapes prejudice against women: An examination across 45 world languages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(1), 7–22.
• Read the tutorial for the method used in this paper.
• Read the pre-print of this article.

Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

• Lindow, Mike, David DeFranza, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra (2021). Partisanship and fear are associated with resistance to COVID-19 directives. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, and Social Media Analysis (WASSA). European Association of Computational Linguistics.

Other Publications

• Stanko, Michael, William Rand, & David DeFranza (2017). Search engine optimization: Note for marketing managers (updated). Ivey Publishing.

Recent Conference Participation

• Bae, Soo Young & David DeFranza. Misinformation on social media: How high-status users shape online public discourse. International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference. Singapore. July 13-17, 2025.
• Bae, Soo Young & David DeFranza. Misinformation, influence, and algorithmic bias: The role of high-status users in misinformation spread. Paris Conference on AI & Digital Ethics 2025. Paris, France. June 16-17, 2025.
• Bae, Soo Young & David DeFranza. Who controls the narrative? The dual role of contributors and amplifiers in online activism. Paris Conference on AI & Digital Ethics 2025. Paris, France. June 16-17, 2025.
• DeFranza, David & Shelly Rathee. Bad ideas attract attention while good ideas are ignored. European Marketing Academy Conference. Pozuelo, Spain. May 27-30, 2025.
• DeFranza, David & Promothesh Chatterjee. When a week is not a week: How temporal boundaries impact event perception. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research Time in Consumption Boutique Conference. Virtual. August 19-20, 2024.
• Vijayakumar, Suhas, W. Yuna Yang, & David DeFranza (presenting author). Lay beliefs about AI and its consequent outcomes. Multidisciplinary Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) at The University of Glasgow. Glasgow, Scotland. April 16, 2024.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. Gender class assignment is associated with stereotypical attitudes toward brand names. Society for Consumer Psychology. San Juan, Puerto Rico. March 2-4, 2023.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. How grammatical gender influences attitudes toward brand names. Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Atlanta, Georgia. February 23-25, 2023.
• DeFranza, David, & Promothesh Chatterjee. Regulatory focus shifts in response to arbitrary temporal boundaries: A quasi-experiment on Twitter. ISMS Marketing Science Conference. Virtual. June 16-17, 2022.
• DeFranza, David, & Promothesh Chatterjee. How arbitrary temporal borders affect consumer perceptions of an upcoming event. Marketing Analytics Symposium. Sydney, Australia. May 26-27, 2022.
• DeFranza, David, Pronobesh Banerjee, & Promothesh Chatterjee. The influence of dialectical reasoning on Amazon product reviews. 8th Pan IIM World Management Conference. Virtual. December 16-18, 2021.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. The influence of language on attitudes toward brands. AMA Summer Academic Conference. Virtual. August 4-6, 2021.
• DeFranza, David, Mike Lindow, Kevin Harrison, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. Religion and reactance to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines. 3i COVID-19 Symposium, University of Utah Health. Virtual. June 4, 2021.
• DeFranza, David, Pronobesh Banerjee, & Promothesh Chatterjee. The influence of culture and dialectical reasoning on Amazon product reviews. ISMS Marketing Science Conference. Virtual. June 3-5, 2021.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. Assessing attitudes toward brands across languages. INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. Virtual. April 12-14, 2021.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. How language influences attitudes toward brands. 4th Workshop on NLP and CSS at the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Virtual. November 20, 2020.
• DeFranza, David, Mike Lindow, Kevin Harrison, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. Religion and reactance to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines. 3i COVID-19 Flash Talks, University of Utah Health. Salt Lake City, Utah (Virtual). October 2, 2020.
• DeFranza, David, & Promothesh Chatterjee. The moderating effect of temporal borders on consumers’ construal of market events: Evidence from Twitter. Society for Consumer Psychology. Huntington Beach, California. March 5-7, 2020.
• DeFranza, David, Himanshu Mishra, & Arul Mishra. Extracting and analyzing psychological constructs from text data: The example of gender prejudice across languages. Marketing Analytics Symposium. Sydney, Australia. February 3-4, 2020.
• DeFranza, David, Arul Mishra, & Himanshu Mishra. How language shapes bias against women: A study of implicit gender bias in 45 world languages. ISMS Marketing Science Conference. Rome, Italy. June 20-29, 2019.

Recent Teaching

• SBUS 46190: Global Business in a Digital Environment (Fall 2023, Summer 2025; University College Dublin)
• MKT 46240: Advanced Analytics & Big Data (Summer 2023, 2024, 2025; University College Dublin)
• MKT 46090: Big Data Analytics (Fall 2023, 2024; University College Dublin)
• MKT 46150: Consumer Insights and Analytics (Fall 2024; University College Dublin)
• MKT 3008S: Digital Marketing Practice (Feb 2024; Aug 2023, 2024; University College Dublin Singapore)
• MKT 42400: Consumer Insights and Analytics (Fall 2022, 2023; University College Dublin)
• MKTG 4770: Consumer Insights and Analytics (Fall 2020; University of Utah)

Education

• 2022, Ph.D., Business Administration (Marketing), David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah
• 2015, M.B.A., Poole College of Management, North Carolina State University
• 2015, M.A., Technology and Communication, Hussman School of Journalism and Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2005, B.A., History, University of New Hampshire

Academic Appointments

• 2022-, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University College Dublin

Professional Experience

• 2015-2017, Director, Optimization Strategy, Brooks Bell. Raleigh, NC
• 2013-2015, Senior Content Strategist, Brooks Bell. Raleigh, NC
• 2013, Marketing Communications Specialist, JMP Division, SAS Institute. Cary, NC
• 2008-2012, Assistant Editor, Web Producer, Discovery Communications. Silver Spring, MD
• 2007-2008, Content Producer, Mahalo.com. Santa Monica, CA
• 2005-2006, English Instructor, NOVA Eikaiwa Language School. Osaka, Japan