Blog

Category: Decision Making

  • The Red Queen And Implications For Best Practice

    It is hard to spend any time at a business school without hearing the phrase best practice. We teach students best practice. Junior professors seek hints from senior folk on best practice. Even schools regularly go through bouts of benchmarking to see if they are adopting best practice. Best practice essentially is something that gets the most…

  • Academics And Political Conclusions

    We all have political opinions. (Having no opinion is a stance in itself). What can we say about academics and political conclusions? Academics Have A Role In Political Discourse Academics have an important role to play in political discourse. Yet, we have to try to rid ourselves of bias and use appropriate evidence. It is therefore disappointing…

  • True But Useless

    The Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, have an entertaining style and together they have generated a number of readable, informative popular psychology/business books. I enjoy the books and generally agree with a lot of what they say. A nice addition to the language is True But Useless. The Problem Of Certainty The brothers do run into the problem facing a lot…

  • Nudges Are Not Magical (Just in Case Someone Thought They Were)

    The idea of nudging, designing choices to help people make better choices, has become popular for good reason. Yet, nudges aren’t magical, which some people seem disappointed about when they find this out. Nudges Or What? A nudge is a well-designed attempt to guide the decision-maker towards a beneficial outcome. The alternative seems to be random,…

  • Understanding What A Fallacy Is

    Formal logic makes for elegant research. It can help us in understanding what a fallacy is. Formal And Informal Logic With formal logic there is a right answer and so researchers can be confident that some choices are simply wrong. Unfortunately, formal logic has relatively limited application in the real world. Gerd Gigerenzer has argued that some flaws in…

  • Bad Arguments

    A lot of arguments simply don’t make sense. Spotting bad arguments is a vital, and I’d guess, rare skill for academics and business people. Ali Almossawi has a fun little book on bad arguments. They are all illustrated to make them more memorable. I don’t completely endorse all the descriptions. Still, he raises important things to bear in mind…

  • The Aura Of Inevitability

    Many markets have characteristics different to those of the “standard” products. By which I mean the apples and oranges one learns about in introductory economics. One of the more interesting facets of the information economy is that some markets can tip. This means success leads to future success. Winners get more. This can create the aura of inevitability.…

  • What Is First Mover Advantage?

    Information Rules by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian is a classic business book. While today’s post will be a bit cranky it isn’t really about the book and I’ll be appropriately positive next week. The book descriptions of business scenarios are dated but the ideas are relatively timeless. Plus the dated examples make you feel young — battles…

  • Marshmallows And Your Future

    Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test is a really enjoyable book. His is a long career and he has numerous studies to draw upon. The whole area has suffered a few attacks (written in 2021 but there are still ideas one should know. (Of course, never get too obsessive about details of out work as our understanding, hopefully,…

  • Rationality And The Republican Autopsy

    Political marketing is about giving voters what they want so one must have some notion of how voters think. With a colleague, June Cotte, I wanted to uncover how political marketers think voters think. The specific question we looked at was: “do political marketers think voters are rational?” What can we say about rationality and the Republican autopsy? Lack Of Clarity…

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