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: Management Theory
Transformative Innovations, An Important Part of the Puzzle
I value grand intellectual sweeps. if you are a tenured professor it seems wrong not to try and give the world your grand vision. So what can we say about transformative innovations? Transformative Innovations Tellis and Rosenzweig take a grand sweep in examining the role of transformative innovations in world history. The book moves from…
Is Sustainable Competitive Advantage A Useful Goal
I must confess to being a bit dubious about the idea of sustainable competitive advantage. It seems designed to allow people to pontificate with a pronouncement that sounds meaningful. Yet, speaking about sustainable competitive advantage often requires little actual evidence given the underlying idea is a bit vague. Sustainable Competitive Advantage A competitive advantage isn’t…
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…
Problems In Academic Research
Writing in the Journal of International Business Studies Klaus Meyer and his colleagues outline some problems in academic research. The authors tell us how they suggest dealing with the problem. Familiar Problems In Academic Research The problems they outline will be quite familiar to anyone following recent controversies in academia. The file drawer problem is…
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…
Marketing Response To Stock Market Pressure
What is the marketing response to stock market pressure? Myopic Management Myopic management/marketing is the tendency to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term profits. It can occur for a number of reasons. Yet, at its heart, pressure from Wall Street appears to drive myopia for public companies. Certainly, many scholars subscribe to…
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…
