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…
Good Practice In Undergraduate Education
One of the strangest things about being a professor is that outsiders think this means you are primarily a teacher. As a researcher, you feel that you aren’t primarily a teacher. (Some snooty colleagues even find being called a teacher a bit of insult). The particularly strange thing is the outsiders do have a sensible…
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…
“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….
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of marketing performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes. “[T]he movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance” (Clark, 1999, page 711). This raised the challenge…
Bribery Works With Students
In what might be classed as a stunningly unsurprising result Michael Hessler and his colleagues did an experiment to demonstrate that bribing students with cookies helps with evaluations of teaching. The headline is that bribery works with students. Broadly speaking I have no doubt that they are right. I have seen a few criticisms of…
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…
