Nov 07 2022
Last week the UTS Business School, in partnership with the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists (GAABS), hosted the 2022 UTS Behavioural Lab Conference. What brought together the ~75 people in the room was a shared interest and expertise in behavioural science and the belief that the people in the room – from academia, industry, …
Apr 28 2021
I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new paper, “Who doesn’t read online consumer reviews, and why?” in the journal, Personality and Individual Differences. A few years ago, I worked with the Consumer Policy Research Centre to better understand Australian’s attitudes towards and usage of online consumer reviews (OCRs). There were a …
Jan 04 2021
A sabbatical is a time for academics to engage in scholarly research away from their home institution (while still getting paid). The idea, I think, is to encourage faculty members to expand their network, learn new skills, and begin large projects that might not otherwise get off the ground amidst the burden of teaching and …
Apr 28 2020
After several years of ups and downs, I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new paper, “The importance of online reviews depends on when they are presented” in the journal, Decision Support Systems. The paper brings to bear a classic focus of cognitive psychology – information order effects – in a much …
Dec 06 2019
My first visit to New Zealand took me to Wellington to attend the 2019 Australia New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference. The conference theme was “Winds of Change” and I very quickly realised that the title was also a clue to the fact that Wellington is, arguably, the windiest city in the world. For most of …
Jul 23 2019
Several years ago, Rick Larrick and I wondered about an important problem: How do you motivate people to make a contribution when that contribution would represent just a small drop in a bucket, nay, an Olympic-sized pool. Building from our previous work regarding the benefits of increasing the scale upon which fuel consumption is expressed, …
Dec 18 2018
There has been a lot of previous research on how risky choices differ depending on whether information (e.g., the performance of a worker) is learned about by “experience” (e.g., a front-line manager observing daily performance) or learned about from “description (e.g., a top-level manager reading a summary of performance over a long period of time). …
Dec 18 2018
After ~5 years of effort, my collaborators (Richard Larrick, Shajuti Hossain, and Dalia Patino-Echeverri ) and I have published some really interesting research today in Nature Climate Change. The take away from this research is in the title: “Consumers underestimate the emissions associated with food but are aided by labels”. You can read the paper here …
Nov 18 2018
This week I traveled to New Orleans to attend the 39th Annual Conference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. This was my second visit to NOLA. This time the weather was cold and windy – a low season for tourism. So, it wasn’t too much of a surprise when I was the only one …
Sep 25 2018
Today I presented to the Sydney Behavioural Economics & Behavioural Science Meetup group. It is great that this group exists and allows people from different backgrounds – industry, government, and academia – to grab a beer and discuss behavioural science. My talk was provocatively titled “Nudges vs. Boosts“. Here’s the blurb: There are many interventions that …
