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 …
Apr 20 2018
On 20 April 2018, I had the opportunity to give a keynote talk at the Link Group conference, which is a firm that administers over 10 million superannuation accounts on behalf of their client funds (e.g., AustralianSuper, REST, Cbus and Hostplus). In attendance were about 50 Fund CEOs, COOs and other Marketing, IT and Operations professionals. My …
Feb 16 2018
Today I had the great pleasure to travel down to Melbourne and present an introductory behavioural economics talk to approximately 100 interested staff members at the National Australia Bank. I covered many of the basic concepts including loss aversion, prospect theory, mental accounting, and the endowment effect. There were some great questions at the end, …
Jan 05 2018
This week I was fortunate to be one of the few to participate in the Society for Consumer Psychology Boutique Conference on Vice and Virtue Consumption. One of the great things about small conferences – this one had less than 120 attendees – is that you get a lot more interaction with people. I find that conversations …
Jan 02 2018
Today I started my new position as a senior lecturer of consumer psychology in the marketing department of the University of Technology Sydney. My new office is located in the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, pictured in the background, which was designed by master-architect Frank Gehry. The building’s design is based on the idea of a tree-house structure …
Dec 08 2017
This week my school hosted the Australia & New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC). My colleague and friend, Dr. Linda Robinson, lead in the organisation of the conference, which included more than 400 delegates. The doctoral colloquium ran for two days and the main conference ran for three days. Organising this event required many hands-on …
