Cass Sunstein’s book — The World According to Star Wars — is a must for Star Wars fans who are also interested in behavioral economics/law/public policy. This is probably a surprisingly big intersection. What do we find out about Star Wars and the US constitution? Star Wars: Why? I must confess to not seeing the appeal of…
Behavioural Insights, Policy Policy, and the OECD
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have a fascinating new initiative. (I wrote this in in 2017 and just edited since). “Behavioral Insights and Public Policy: Lessons from Round the World.” The book which accompanies the initiative has extensive case studies. The case studies outline how behavioral insights have been deployed. This has advanced…
Smoothing Data
Excel can be a very useful tool. Though it cannot easily do the most advanced statistical tasks. Excell can tackle most everyday business analytics. Today we see how a business advisor discusses a range of challenges including smoothing data. Balanced Scorecards Ron Person shows how to produce balanced scorecards in a book that is packed…
Field Guide to Lies
Daniel Levitin has an very enjoyable and informative popular science book in his Field Guide to Lies. He surveys how we know what we know, and how we communicate it to others. To be fair not all of it is about lies, for instance, he discusses how data is collected. A lot of the problems he…
Improving Public Policy Through Testing
David Halpern is an interesting character. Originally an advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government he went on to establish the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights for David Cameron’s Conservative government. His CV makes sense to me given what he specializes in. His aim is to make government policy better. The politicians decide what should be done and Halpern tries to ensure it…
Conducting Business Tests
We should be conducting business tests to have more confidence we are doing the right thing. Small And Big Decisions In business decisions are often taken “without having any real evidence to back them up” (Davenport, 2009, page 69). This is a source of great frustration to me, (and many academics). To be fair sometimes there…
The Persistence of Academic Customs
Recently I was reading Max Weber’s thoughts on “Science as a Vocation” given in a lecture on November 7th, 1917. By science Weber means knowledge creation in the broader sense so pretty much all academics should be included as scientists. It can also tell us about the persistence of academic customs. The Persistence of Academic Customs There…
Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More?
One puzzle for academics, myself included, is why businesses don’t experiment more? Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More? Experiments have great potential to improve business outcomes. Often businesses don’t seem to do much experimenting. Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus…
Teaching CLV Badly
Ex-Ivey PHD student and now University of Calgary professor, Charan Bagga, and I have just published an article. This focused on the teaching of CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). We surveyed the state of case-based teaching materials related to CLV and found them a pretty shoddy bunch. Teaching CLV badly seems to be the default way to teach…
Causation And The Post Hoc Fallacy
Today’s post looks at causation and the post hoc fallacy. Types Of Fallacy There are generally two types of fallacy. The first is nice and clean. These are formal fallacies. These are clearly wrong by the rules of logic. The classic is the well-known fallacy that: If p then q, does not mean that if q…
