Congratulations to Aylin Cakanlar

Aylin Canlar with her thesis "Essays on consumers' socially responsible decision making".

Aylin Cakanlar is originally from Turkey and came to Sweden as an exchange student in 2013. She completed her master degree at Linnaeus University in 2016 and started her PhD studies in 2017. During her PhD studies, she has been visiting PhD student at Boston College and the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Three questions to Aylin

How did you choose your subject for the dissertation?

I have always been interested in consumer behavior. When I started PhD, I knew that I wanted to do something about consumer behavior. Moreover, I was born and raised in Turkey and moved to Sweden seven years ago. Coming from a country where sustainability is still developing, and given that Sweden is one of the most sustainability-minded countries in the world, I was intrigued by the strong sustainable norms among Swedish consumers, which ultimately brought me to have a strong focus on sustainability and socially responsibility decision making in my doctoral career.  

The dissertation was conducted online.

Can you tell us something about the conclusions you made in your dissertation?

I have written a compilation thesis meaning that I have four articles examining the consumers’ socially responsibility decision-making from different angles. First, I examined sustainable consumption in a romantic relationship context. Specifically, I looked into how unsustainable decision made by one partner influence the other partner’s sustainability-related decision. I find that whether consumers imitate their partner’s unsustainable behavior or attempts to balance it by engaging in opposite behavior depends on relationship power. Second part of the dissertation focuses on political ideology and examines how political ideology affects sustainable behavior. In this part of the dissertation, I find that consumers’ political identities influence their willingness to engage in sustainable consumption, covid-19 behaviors, and support for peer-to-peer providers in the sharing economy context.

What has been easy or difficult in the work on the dissertation?

Experiments were the main method of this dissertation. I have conducted 16 online experiments, two Facebook split tests, and one field study, which was definitely challenging but it was also fun to create experiments, and analyze data. The hypotheses generation stage was definitely harder as it took a lot of reading, thinking and discussion with my supervisors and coauthors.  

Read more about the thesis "Essays on consumers’ socially responsible decision making"

Aylin Cakanlar together with Fredrik Nordin, chairman of the dissertation and Jakob Östberg, supervisor. All from the Marketing Section at Stockholm Business School.