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…
Category: Decision Making
“Rational” Decision Making in Practice
Behavioural Economics (and related marketing research) has great potential for practical application. There are a number of things that people reliably do that cause them problems. So advice can help improve this. Presh Talwalkar has a book on improving decision making — The Irrationality Illusion — that offers some tips for making decisions more rational….
Advertising Budgeting And Managerially Relevant Research
Academic research occasionally desires to be practical. Various journals therefore often have sections that allow for the reporting of the results of practical work with managers. The journals publish such studies even where there aren’t significant theoretical contributions. In the past the Marketing Science journal has published work under “Applications”. In this vein Doyle and…
The Data Gender Gap
Caroline Criado Perez’s book focuses on the challenges facing women in a world where the primary gatherers of data have been/usually still are men. It highlights the problem of data heavy systems not being as fair as the idea of impartial ‘math’ might imply. (See also here). The problem of what Perez calls the data…
Improving How We See The World
Today I’ll share some advice from Hans Rosling’s wonderful book Factfulness. (He founded the Gapminder educational not-for-profit, see here). This advocates that the world is getting better. Despite the obvious challenges remaining we need to understand this to see what is working and do more of it. Rosling shows a positive view from the data…
A Positive View Of The World Using Facts
I thought Han Rosling’s book (written with his son and daughter in law) ‘Factfulness‘ was wonderful. It was engagingly written but the real joy was the author’s ability to explain the world using data rather than hunches and pre-conceptions. It may come as a great surprise to many that Rosling’s take on the world is…
A Defense Of Enlightenment Thinking
Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a wonderful book. Pinker’s work is precisely the sort of thing that we need more of. I.e. writing from knowledgeable people able to see the big picture. The big picture in Enlightenment Now is about the biggest picture one can have. It is a defense of enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment:…
The Science Of Spotting BS
The authors clearly had a lot of fun writing their paper on the reception and detection of BS. They use the term “bullshit” more in the first few paragraphs than most people use their core term in the whole of any paper. That said, why not? It is an interesting and important topic. Do people…
Testing Psychic Powers
One of the most ‘interesting’ academic papers of recent times is Daryl Bem’s paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (a reputable journal) on psi. (Yes, psychic phenomenon, he was interested in testing psychic powers). He purported to show that people had the ability to ‘feel’ the future and so predict it better…
The Impact Of Conformity And The Need For Uniqueness
Analytical models are fascinating ways to look at what happens in markets. They can look a bit odd from the outside. These models tend to have a ton of strong assumptions which might lead to questions about their value. They can, however, help us think through some commonly observed phenomenon in markets. What then can…
