What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the purpose of firms. What are they…
Category: Decision Making
People Aren’t Getting Worse
Ever since I was in secondary school (high school in US terms) I have thought it is bizarre that people think that humans are getting worse. Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert wrote a paper in Nature on this phenomenon which they call The Illusion of Moral Decline. In many ways, they have written the paper…
Clear Data-Driven Stories
Scott Galloway has a book on where the US is currently. He provides a useful example of clear data-driven stories. A Famous Marketing Professor Galloway is a marketing professor and as such I am naturally supportive. It is great that he is famous and appears in the media so much. I’m all for it. We…
Do People Vote With Their Wallets?
One of the classic problems in understanding voter behavior is whether people vote with their wallets. Bascially, do voters make choices that depend heavily upon their own economic self-interest? Like almost any social science question you are never going to get 100% compliance with any idea. One can almost certainly find someone who calculates what…
GMOs Forget The Science
Scientists including biologists, medical doctors, and geneticists have many wonderful qualities. Yet, if the public policy response to Covid-19 taught us anything it was that some people who are great in their scientific fields have communication problems. This isn’t just a shame. It often undermines everything that they are trying to do. I see a…
Not Aiding An Opposing Group
The fact that we form groups, alliances even, is fundamental human behavior. Working together allows us to achieve things that we couldn’t do independently. Sadly, almost inevitably, being in a group brings conflict with other groups. Much work is done on how we react to group-based conflict. What do we know about whether we are…
Using Data In Decisions
It is important to have good intuition when using data in decisions, and this intuition can be improved. This is a central message of a book that recently emerged from teaching these topics at Columbia University. The message makes a lot of sense and is likely, if anything, to make even more sense as time…
Communicating Numbers
Chip Heath and Karla Starr have a book on communicating numbers. It makes a lot of sensible points. Some might seem obvious but it is easy to get these sort of things wrong. I certainly have in the past, so the advice is worth paying attention to. They even put a mention into their book…
Solving Problems Upstream
Dan Heath has a book on solving problems upstream. The central idea is that it is better to solve a problem nearer its source than try and solve the problem once it has fully manifested. Heath’s hard-to-disagree with advice is that it is better to stop the horror movie monster being conjured rather than having…
Ideology, Persuasion, And Going Green
A major challenge is persuading members of the public with very different worldviews to take actions aimed at the common good, such as recycling. An appeal that works for a conservative might not work on a liberal, and vice versa. What then do we know about ideology, persuasion, and going green? People Differ In What…
