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…
Category: Decision Making
Experimenters And Economists
Advocates for more behavioural approaches to understanding economics often use experiments. These typically show people acting in strange ways. Or at least that violate the principles of traditional economics. (Maybe the people are normal and the principles weird). A key thing is that experimenters and economists can be the same people. There is much potential uniting these…
The Last Mile: Implementing Your Wonderful Strategy
Dilip Soman’s The Last Mile is an excellent book. It reiterates fascinating points that are commonly found in behavioral (economics) books. What sets the book apart? The effective structure put to the insights. There are plenty of classifications and tables. These help us better understand the vast number of behavioral insights that the book contains. Test Your Ideas Other interesting points…
Why Even The Best Economists Don’t Get Marketing
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have good points, excellent stories, and a clear aim in Phishing for Phools. The aim is to convince economist colleagues that all market outcomes aren’t perfect. I applaud their aim. That said, their conceptualization assumes consumers (and others) are robots with a monkey on our backs. The monkey prevents us from being “fully rational”. I’d say, however, that we…
Why Gift Cards Are Interesting
In a special holiday edition I focus on why Gift cards are interesting. They are central to many retailers’ strategies and yet economic theory often seems premised on the idea that they shouldn’t exist. Why Give Gift Cards? The argument against them is that a gift card is a bit like cash, just worse. Closed loop cards, those…
Improving Forecasting
Philip Tetlock’s book on expert political judgment was a classic. That said, he clearly thinks that the message taken from that book was too strong. Previously he suggested that experts just aren’t that good at forecasting. He still retains that theme in his new work — but now he is more interested in improving forecasting. Improving Forecasting…
What American Football Can Tell Us About Management
One problem in studying managerial behavior is that firms aren’t very open about their failures. Still, a scholar trying to show that managers make mistakes won’t have many volunteers to serve as examples. This can, therefore, leave the perception that most organizations run smoothly. This has always seemed improbable to me. I’ve worked in several fields. I’ve encountered numerous committed, hardworking people…
Who Doesn’t Want Nudges And Competent Government?
The idea of nudging, structuring decisions to encourage people to make good choices, is surprisingly controversial. An example of a nudge might be to encourage those who are qualified to take up a social benefit or to get a tax break to do so. The nudge might be as simple as creating an easy to use application…
What Use Is An Evolutionary Definition of Rationality?
Eyal Winter’s book, Feeling Smart, is interesting but frustrating. There is much good content. Indeed, some of the stories are great. My biggest problem was the casual use of concepts. This was exemplified by the central idea of his book. He said that feelings/emotions can help you make smart decisions. I totally agree but the big problem was…
How Managers Decide
My second delve into Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving concerns managerial decision making. How managers decide is a massively important topic. Equilibrium Conditions Don’t Describe Any Point In Time Economic models often study equilibrium conditions. These apply where no manager will want to change their decision. Given they model this some academics seem to think that this describes…
