Nov 01 2016
Today I took advantage of Ralph Hertwig’s long-standing offer to come and visit the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development. The last time I visited the Institute was way back in 2000 for a summer school. I have fond memories. For example, I remember watching an epic soccer match in which Germany lost …
Oct 21 2016
Simone Wies invited me to Goethe University in Frankfurt to spend some time with the marketing folk for a few days. It was fun to briefly relive our shared office experience (although, I must point out that Simone’s current office space is more than twice that of our old combined office spaces at Duke, and it includes a mini table …
Jul 21 2016
On July 1st I decided to pitch an idea to The Conversation. I have been a long time reader of the not-for-profit media outlet, which uses content sourced from the academic and research community, and thought it time to contribute. I had recently concluded a literature review on the topic of overconfidence and so thought I …
Mar 01 2016
I was very happy to host one of my mentors, UNSW Professor John Roberts this week. He gave a well-attended seminar where he discussed how we could use a strategic framework to address the feasibility of any strategic initiative, including what research area to pursue. He boiled this strategic framework down to the following eight questions. Strengths and …
Jan 06 2016
I was very happy to hear that Robert Hoffmann, Marie-Anne Cam, Monica Tan, and I were awarded an Academic Research Grant from the Australian Centre for Financial Studies (ACFS). Our project is titled, “Is More Information Always Better? A behavioural study on superfunds optimal disclosure design”. In this project, we aim to answer three specific research questions …
Oct 02 2015
This week I made the very long trip from Melbourne (via Sydney and Dallas) to New Orleans to participate in the Annual Meeting for the Association for Consumer Research, October 1 – 4, 2015. I arrived a day early in order to tick some things off the bucket list, including enjoying a beignets, spotting swamp alligators, and enjoying a …
Apr 29 2015
RMIT is a content partner of Australia’s Marketing Magazine. I jumped at the opportunity to write a piece on “Information Design”. My article is titled “How marketers construct ‘consumer’ preferences” and came out in the April/May edition, which is now on the shelves. In the piece, I discuss examples of great information design from industry and research (including …
Jul 07 2014
Last week I moved from the United States back to Australia to begin working as a lecturer in the marketing group of RMIT University’s School of Economics, Finance and Marketing. (For those of you who don’t know, in Australia a “lecturer” is equivalent to the academic rank of tenure-track assistant professor.) I’ll be helping to teach “Marketing …
May 16 2014
Earlier this month I participated in the 2014 Duke University Energy Research Collaboration Workshop, which was sponsored by the Duke University Energy Initiative and open to Duke University faculty, research staff, and their students interested in energy. The presentations focused on recent energy-related research by Duke faculty, staff and students. I was part of session focused on the a behavioral science …
May 16 2014
This week my paper with Rick Larrick was published in the Spring edition of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. The paper, which can be found here, is called “Metric and scale design as choice architecture tools” and discusses a simple way to increase consumer’s preferences for more fuel efficient vehicles: to present the …
