Ethan Milne
Incoming Assistant Professor of Marketing · Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University PhD @ Ivey Business School
I research prosocial and antisocial behavior, usually at the same time. Recurring questions in my work:
- Why do people intentionally purchase offensive products?
- How can donations be weaponized to punish others?
- How do status motives drive boycott movements?
- How do researchers select stimuli in prosocial-behavior research?
- What even is “prosocial behavior” anyway?
- What drives fanfiction authors to post free content online?
I answer these with a combination of lab experiments, surveys, and webscraped datasets.
Recent
Retributive Philanthropy Journal of Marketing Research, 2025
We define and test retributive philanthropy — donations made with the explicit intent of harming a third party. Across qualitative interviews, real-world anti-vaccine protestor giving data, and ten lab studies, we show this behavior is emotionally, motivationally, and behaviorally distinct from traditional prosocial giving.
I’m also drafting working papers on offensive consumption, status-seeking aggression in boycotts, fanfiction-as-marketing, and what we should even mean by “prosocial” in the first place. See all papers →
Elsewhere
I also write occasional notes about side projects (text mining, LLM-simulated participants, fanfiction-as-data), and maintain a few small R packages — including Haikuify, which finds accidental haikus in text.