One puzzle for academics, myself included, is why businesses don’t experiment more? Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More? Experiments have great potential to improve business outcomes. Often businesses don’t seem to do much experimenting. Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus…
Category: Decision Making
Causation And The Post Hoc Fallacy
Today’s post looks at causation and the post hoc fallacy. Types Of Fallacy There are generally two types of fallacy. The first is nice and clean. These are formal fallacies. These are clearly wrong by the rules of logic. The classic is the well-known fallacy that: If p then q, does not mean that if q…
Motivation For The New Year
Let us start the new year thinking about how motivation works. What encourages us to action? How can knowledge help us with motivation for the new year’s resolutions? Simple Views Of Motivation Dan Ariely has a new book on this topic. And to motivate you to read it I’ll say it is a very short book. Ariely…
How Long Will We Be Unhappy?
A fascinating line of research tackles the problem of affective forecasting. Such forecasting involves questions such as: How Long Will We Be Unhappy? Affective Forecasting This area of research studies our predictions of how we will feel when events happen. We typically aren’t very good at affective forecasting. .. expectations are often important and often wrong. They are important…
Behavioural Economics And Policy In Canada
One of the most interesting things about behavioural economics is that it is quite practical. The findings can apply in the public sphere. Such application can often be very direct. Furthermore, many of the ideas generated in behavioural economics are simple tweaks. Tweaks can be very cheap to implement. This, therefore, can make the ideas popular…
Nudging: Calm Down It Really Is Not The End Of Freedom
Mark D. White has written an ominously titled book “The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism”. He really doesn’t like the sort of Nudging proposed by Thaler and Sunstein in their book, Nudge. I think that he needs to chill out. He gets excited about minor philosophical issues while ignoring big social issues. Nudges…
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…
