CEO Club Boston 2011
Please click for Dr. Aaron Reid’s “True Drivers of Consumer Behavior” at CEO Club Boston 2011 event.
Tag: Book Review
Read posts about book reviews on Sentient Decision Science’s implicit market research blog.
Variety: The spice of life. Or is it?
People like to be given a choice. The desire to exercise one’s own free will and proclivity to act in one’s own interests might just be the last part of our consciousness that’s keeping us away from The Matrix, 1984, Brave New World, or whatever your favorite dystopian story is. But is there such a thing as “too many choices?” Sheena Iyengar, behavioral psychologist and choice expert, studies how people make decisions precisely to answer this question. And her research has revealed some startling implications!
A recent New York Times article highlighted Iyengar’s fascinating research in a review of her new book, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar, a Stanford grad, has been in the field of social psychology and decision theory for almost 15 years. Her most famous project: a jelly tasting.
Spent Review: Why Consumers Empty their Pockets
Society revolves around an endless parade of enviable goods—Rolex watches, Prada handbags, cars flaunting the Ferrari logo, and artwork by Rembrandt, Monet, or Warhol. After depositing a paycheck, we race to the shopping mall to snatch up the latest and greatest items, never pausing to consider the true reasons behind our “need” for these products. […]
Nudging our Way to a Better World
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein wrote Nudge with optimism and dedication as primary tools while arguing for ways which we could improve our world. And there’s no government policy shift necessary – we only need to pay closer consideration to how we present decisions to individuals. The authors show how small changes in such “choice architecture” can produce big results. You might be surprised, but just by changing the order of food items in a cafeteria can increase or decrease the frequency which certain foods are selected by as much as 25%. Imagine, just from placing the vegetables at eye level in a prominent position in our school cafeterias and placing the Hostess delicacies on a hard-to-reach shelf (or even more sinister, hide them in a cupboard where students must open a door to access them), we could significantly improve our children’s diets.
Behavioral Economics: The Next Frontier for Market Research
Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational, recently published an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review titled “The End of Rational Economics.” Following the global economic crisis, it has become painfully apparent that individuals do not always make rational decisions and the invisible […]