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…
Category: Management Theory
The Practitioner-Research Divide Beyond Marketing
Neil Anderson and his colleagues have given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice. They focus on this in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. I don’t know much about this discipline. Still, a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. As such, they highlight the practitioner-research divide beyond marketing. In…
Marketing And A (Very Old) New Technology
Technology changes constantly. In recent centuries, at least, people have become used to marvels appearing that they couldn’t imagine when they were growing up. People encounter new technology. How do they react? How did they react to (very old) new technology? Early Movies: A Major Innovation I read an interesting paper on reactions to early…
Predicting What Image Works For An Individual
One of the central challenges of marketing is that people differ. Marketers would love to create marketing communications that work for everyone. While some communications do pretty well nothing has universal appeal. Some images work fantastically for some people but turn others off. How can we predict who will like what? What helps us in…
The Growth Rate Of Modern Science
How has modern science progressed? This is a tough question to answer for the last few generations. It is even harder if you have aspirations to go back a lot further. Lutz Bornmann and Rudiger Mutz certainly don’t lack for ambition. They look at the growth of science since the 17th Century. The growth rate…
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…
Pareto Efficiency In Markets
A key idea when analyzing markets is Pareto efficiency. This is also called Pareto optimality. Despite the name it is a simple idea. We see Pareto efficiency in markets whenever you can’t make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. There is thus a number of optimal points. Each point involves a different…
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…
