Charan Bagga, a former Phd student now a professor at Calgary, June Cotte, an Ivey colleague, and myself, have a recent paper in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science on the Endowment effect. Specifically what happens to the endowment effect when you rent or borrow. What then is the endowment effect for renting…
Category: Decision Making
Mathematical Thinking, Cons, And Finding Results
Jordan Ellenberg tells us how to use mathematical thinking to “not be wrong”. He tells us about mathematical thinking, cons, and finding results. Good Advice The advice is often very good. If he wants to call it as a result of mathematics that works for me. Following his advice will help us have better judgment….
Fairness In Business
A tricky problem in business research is understanding the role of fairness concerns. It is pretty obvious from just a cursory look at social interactions (of which business relations are a special type) that fairness matters to a lot of people a lot of the time. Often consumers and workers complain about lack of fairness….
Logical Problems
Logic is a challenge for all of us. To get through life we make a lot of leaps that are probably not justified. That said it is helpful to sit back and think through the leaps we are making. Bo Bennett has put together a compilation of logical fallacies. These range from some classic ones…
Machine Learning And The End Of The World
This week I have a second (and last) post on Agrawal, Gans and Golfarb’s Prediction Machines. This interesting books discusses the difference between machine learning and traditional statistics. The idea being machine learning is more functional, more concerned with a useful result than a precisely accurate one. The challenge is that machine learning predicts not…
A Holmesian Dual Process Model
Dual system approaches are all the rage in psychology. A popular book suggests a Holmesian dual process model. Dual Process Models The idea is that our brains use two separate processes to come to decisions. I don’t think anyone literally thinks there are just two separate systems as such. The brain is massively complex with…
Do Facts Matter To Persuasion?
One of the major debates in marketing is: Do Facts Matter To Persuasion? The good news is that it will never be finished. Sometimes they do, sometimes less so is probably the answer. Still, it generates debate. Understanding People Who Don’t Think Like Us I really wanted to like Scott Adams’ Win Bigly. What was…
Research And Popular Advice
Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind is a curious book. It is highly influenced by academic research (the author is an academic). Yet, I wouldn’t say it was an academic book. It tells us something about research and popular advice and how they mix. Academic Self-Help Levitin’s doesn’t read like the standard academic book: “here —…
Big Data And Understanding Human Behavior
What do we know about big data and understanding human behavior? New Data, New Insights The premise in Everybody Lies seems sound to me. Here we have an entirely new dataset that reveals things about people that they are not willing to reveal. Advice: don’t listen to the audiobook in the car with kids. It…
Do We Always Fall For Cons?
Maria Konnikova goes through an exciting review of a lot of psychological findings in her book — The Confidence Game. At times I wondered, do we always fall for cons? Confidence Helps Konnikova is an engaging writer and her book is well informed by academic research. She has the fascinating story of a con man…
