FASTER, CHEAPER, EASIER BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH ONLINE One thing Decision Science News particularly enjoys about being at Yahoo! Research is the brilliant colleagues. This week, two of them, Winter Mason and Sid Suri, presented us with this manuscript which is a guide to conducting research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Manuscript? Manuscript from heaven, we say, for […]
WHAT MAKES JDM DISTINCT? A friend of Decision Science News, who is co-organizing a session on JDM (judgment and decision making research) for students, recently emailed a handful of JDM researchers: Those of us in the JDM session are doing quite different research and couldn’t really see how we were more “JDM” than, say, someone […]
TYPES OF DEFAULTS AND HOW TO SET THEM Defaults are settings or choices that apply to individuals who do not take active steps to change them (Brown & Krishna, 2004). Collections of default settings, or “default configurations” determine the way products, services, or policies are initially encountered by consumers, while “reuse defaults” come into play […]
THE POTENTIAL FOR A BOND BUBBLE Small investors have been a lot of fun to watch for quite some time now. In the 1930s, doing the opposite of the small investors (the so-called “odd lot” crowd because they could not afford to trade in amounts as large as standard units) was a popular contrarian strategy. […]
MYTHS AND TRUTHS ABOUT AN OFTEN-USED, LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD STATISTICAL PROCEDURE If you go to a consumer research conference, you will hear tales of how experiments have undergone particular statistical rites: the attainment of the elusive crossover interaction, the demonstration of full mediation through Baron and Kenny’s sacred procedure, and so on. DSN has nothing against any […]
HORMONE LINKED TO IN-GROUP GOODNESS, OUT-GROUP BADNESS Who doesn’t like oxytocin? Who could dislike any substance referred to as a cuddle chemical? The answer may be you, if you are not in with the crowd feeling the effects of the hormone. Carsten de Dreu and a super-long list of co-authors (listed below), have administered oxytocin to […]
QUIZ YOUR LOVED ONES ABOUT THEIR PROPENSITY TO PLAN John Lynch, Richard Netemeyer, Stephen Spiller, Alessandra Zammit have recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research this article on the propensity to plan and financial well being ABSTRACT Planning has pronounced effects on consumer behavior and intertemporal choice. We develop a six-item scale measuring individual […]
COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBLEM, INTUITIVE REPRESENTATION Blog posts about counterintuitive probability problems generate lots of opinions with a high probability. Andrew Gelman and readers have been having a lot of fun with the following probability problem: I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys? The […]
In baseball, what are the chances the winner will win again against the same opponent the very next day?
How many observations should you have before constructing a confidence interval?