Blog

Category: Decision Making

  • Marketers Are Human

    Matthew Willcox’s The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers Instincts won the AMA’s Berry Book Award and I can see why. Willcox reviews many of the key points from the best academic books. For example, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Vlad Griskevicius and Douglas Kenrick’s The Rational Animal. Where Willcox adds value is…

  • Learning From A Case Study Of Harvard Business School

    I see much value in opinionated books, they are great at starting conversations. Bearing that in mind I will say that I enjoyed Duff McDonald’s The Golden Passport. He describes the history of Harvard Business School (HBS) and he isn’t afraid to give his thoughts. What then can we learn from a case study of…

  • Behavioral Economics Sports Bingo

    A bit of an unusual post today. It being summer, therefore, here is a behavioral economics sports bingo card. Behavioural Economics Sports Bingo Game I’m looking for some help in assessing my new Behavioral Economics Sports Bingo game. The idea is that when you are watching sports you lookout for interesting comments from commentators, players,…

  • Tackling Big Problems With Behavioral Science

    Jason Furman (former chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers) discusses tackling big problems with behavioral science. He says behavioral studies can help address four major issues in the economy. Tackling Big Problems With Behavioral Science He isn’t joking when he says they are major. They really are. The four he choose are: 1)…

  • The Failure Of Markets

    I very much enjoyed John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail. It is an ambitious piece in which he tries to describe how economic thought has impacted real-world markets. He has a special focus on the collapse of the financial markets in 2007/8 and the economic thought behind the failure to regulate the markets properly. What does he say about the failure…

  • The Trump Fallacy

    Dixit and Nalebuff have great skill in popularizing game theory. Today I will detail a problem that I will call The Trump Fallacy. Theory And Understanding The World Their work is full of interesting examples and useful ways of looking at sometimes tricky concepts. They are strong believers in having theory to back up ideas…

  • Behaviourally Informed Government Policy

    In a companion piece to the article published on the BEAR (Behavioural Economics In Action at Rotman) website Dilip Soman, Katie Chen, and myself have an article in the Spring issue of the Rotman Management magazine. This is an issue completely dedicated to behavioral insights. It has some major academic names in the field — Richard Thaler, George…

  • Reference Group Neglect: Don’t Gamble With Gamblers

    The problem of why entrepreneurs start up companies is an interesting one. Many fail but it doesn’t seem to put new ones off. Colin Camerer and Dan Lovallo examined a possible reason for this. (They examine it in a lab so can’t give definitive answers but it is still interesting.) The authors use a small game…

  • Food Lessons From An Economist

    Tyler Cowen’s “An Economist Gets Lunch” is pretty self-indulgent. In this book we get food lessons from an economist. Self-Indulgence Firstly, Cowen really loves his food and is happy to share his enthusiasm for high-quality meals. The second sense of self-indulgence is of an academic doing what he loves. I don’t mean to imply this negatively. When people do…

  • Improving Public Policy With Better Assumptions

    Katie Chen (then at Western), Dilip Soman (of Rotman), and myself published a whitepaper. (I wrote this in 2017 and have edited since). This was through BEAR at the University of Toronto. We discussed moves towards improving public policy with better assumptions. Specifically the ideas about human behavior used in models. (More empiricially valid models in academic terms). By…

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