Elinor Ostrom had a profound impact on research about institutions. She got the Nobel Prize in Economics. This was for her work thinking about how social affairs could be governed: Governing The Commons. Common Pool Resoruces This goes much wider than corporate governance. It speaks to how communities deal with the control of their valuable…
Author: neilbendle
Neil is an Associate Professor Marketing at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He investigates the measurement of marketing performance, the accounting/marketing interface, and the impact of non-standard decision making in commercial and political markets.
Neil is the Chair of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board advisors. He is co-author of Marketing Metrics: The Manager’s Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance (3rd edition) Wharton School Press and is co-author of a cartoon book: Behavioural Economics for Kids.
“Rational” Decision Making in Practice
Behavioural Economics (and related marketing research) has great potential for practical application. There are a number of things that people reliably do that cause them problems. So advice can help improve this. Presh Talwalkar has a book on improving decision making — The Irrationality Illusion — that offers some tips for making decisions more rational….
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of marketing performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes. “[T]he movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance” (Clark, 1999, page 711). This raised the challenge…
Bribery Works With Students
In what might be classed as a stunningly unsurprising result Michael Hessler and his colleagues did an experiment to demonstrate that bribing students with cookies helps with evaluations of teaching. The headline is that bribery works with students. Broadly speaking I have no doubt that they are right. I have seen a few criticisms of…
Advertising Budgeting And Managerially Relevant Research
Academic research occasionally desires to be practical. Various journals therefore often have sections that allow for the reporting of the results of practical work with managers. The journals publish such studies even where there aren’t significant theoretical contributions. In the past the Marketing Science journal has published work under “Applications”. In this vein Doyle and…
The Data Gender Gap
Caroline Criado Perez’s book focuses on the challenges facing women in a world where the primary gatherers of data have been/usually still are men. It highlights the problem of data heavy systems not being as fair as the idea of impartial ‘math’ might imply. (See also here). The problem of what Perez calls the data…
Thinking Differently About Business School Cases
Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. Cases nowadays come from the perspective of management. There exists a management objective that the students are trying to deliver. This excessively managerial perspective is…
What Caused The Classic Polling Disaster?
In presidential election polling 1936 stands out as a uniquely bad disaster. What caused the classic polling pisaster? 1936, The Worst Ever Polling Disaster? In 1936 The Literary Digest made a prediction that Republican Alf Landon would beat the incumbent Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. This rates as arguably the biggest disaster…
Leadership In Politics
Real-world examples often provide concepts that apply in business. I worked in politics for many years and I think that there are lessons for educational and commercial leadership. Good political leaders try and seize temporary opportunities. Their dramatic actions make for exciting highs when successful and dramatic lows when not. So what can we learn…
Improving How We See The World
Today I’ll share some advice from Hans Rosling’s wonderful book Factfulness. (He founded the Gapminder educational not-for-profit, see here). This advocates that the world is getting better. Despite the obvious challenges remaining we need to understand this to see what is working and do more of it. Rosling shows a positive view from the data…
