There are lots of reasons to like Bergstrom and West’s book Calling Bullshit. There is just so much BS available to anyone who wants to consume it. Calling BS is a skill we all need. Calling BS BS can pose a threat to democracy if people choose their leaders based upon things that just aren’t…
Category: Decision Making
Finding The Right Marketing Metrics
It is extremely challenging to get marketing metrics pieces published at top marketing journals. Indeed, a piece on finding the right marketing metrics isn’t a typical article. One challenge is that often journals want something “new”. Investigating what managers do doesn’t seem new enough. This is a real shame. I worry editorial decisions encourage the…
Regulation for Conservatives
How much the government should involve themselves in the lives of the public? This was been the theme of 2020 and the Covid crisis. Whatever your views it is unlikely you were totally happy. Die hard libertarians were not happy. Even in the most conservative of jurisdictions they could object. They could point to plenty…
Two-Part Tariffs and Disneyland
Interesting questions often precipitate (good) academic research. A great question is “why does Disneyland not make you pay for each ride”. This is the setup for Walter Oi’s examination of pricing back in 1971. Oi asks “If you were the owner of Disneyland, should you charge high lump sum admission fees and give the rides…
Comparing Canadian And US Consumers
Comparing consumers in different countries can be challenging. I must confess to having doubts about a lot of cross-cultural research, see here for lots of grouchy comments on cross cultural measurement. I worry it is what nice middle class people do when they want to stereotype while still seeing themselves as free of prejudice. Suffice…
The Problem with Lay Rationality
I haven’t written about rationality for a while but I’ll return to note a recent paper by Xilin Li and Christopher Hsee. In it they look at the impact of lay views of rationality and raise a problem with such lay rationality. It is a fun paper and, broadly speaking, I agree that their conclusion…
Experimental Philosophy
Ruwen Ogien’s book — Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants –lays out a number of approaches to experimental philosophy. Much of the text involves descriptions of classic moral problems. These put to normal people and are often challenging by their nature. The most famous probably being trolley problems. These investigate what people think…
Surviving In The Misinformation Age
David Helfand has written a book designed to illuminate thinking that will help spot problems in the public discourse. He gives a guide to surviving in the misinformation age. Big Issues Around Scientific Understanding He is aiming for a popular book, but not too much. He doesn’t dumb it down. At times I felt he…
Stereotyping And Market Entry Strategy
I have a paper just published in Customer Needs and Solutions on stereotyping and market entry strategy. This paper has quite a history, with early versions arising from my dissertation (13 years ago). It was quite a journey. The final paper looks nothing like where it started. (For example, it contains a minor nod to…
Governing The Commons
Elinor Ostrom had a profound impact on research about institutions. She got the Nobel Prize in Economics. This was for her work thinking about how social affairs could be governed: Governing The Commons. Common Pool Resoruces This goes much wider than corporate governance. It speaks to how communities deal with the control of their valuable…
