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Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior

4. January 2007

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Only a day ago, in our post Neuro-Hype, we lamented the abundance of brain scan hype and the dearth of research that examines real purchase behavior. As if on cue, Carnegie Mellon University released Researchers Use Brain Scans To Predict When People Will Buy. While we haven’t perused the full study details, which appear [...]

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Neuro-Hype

3. January 2007

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A post by Josh Wright on the Truth on the Market blog, Rubenstein on Behavioral Economics, called my attention to a year-old paper by Ariel Rubinstein of the school of Economics at Tel Aviv University and the Department of Economics at New York University. Discussion of “BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS” takes issue with the [...]

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Voodoo Neuroeconomics

28. December 2006

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In neuromarketing, it’s not uncommon to see a big leap from actual research data to a questionable business conclusion. It turns out that neuroeconomics research can be similarly used. You can be the judge of whether BrandMillion.com is one of these wacky and unsupportable leaps or the Next Big Thing. The firm’s [...]

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Deal or No Deal

21. December 2006

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The wildly popular television game show, Deal or No Deal, is a televised neuroeconomics experiment (or would be if you could scan the brains of the participants as they played): each week, contestants choose to accept a fixed amount of money, or keep playing with the possibility of a still-higher payoff. In each round [...]

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Avoiding Fairness Dissonance

10. November 2006

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Most of us attempt to treat each other fairly, and react negatively if we feel we are treated unfairly. We may even react negatively if we see someone else being treated in an unfair manner. Research shows that this sense of fairness isn’t something we learn in school or from our parents (though [...]

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Pricing, Ego, and Emotion

6. November 2006

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Neuromarketing and Pricing. Why do people sometimes set prices that are too high, and then stubbornly stick with them despite evidence from the marketplace that the price is indeed wrong? Neuroeconomics research tells us that financial decisions are often evaluated in a way that lets our emotions overrule rational financial analysis, and setting [...]

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Neuroeconomics Loses to Crackberry

3. November 2006

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Neuroeconomics finished a respectable runner-up in the 2006 Word of the Year contest run by staffers at Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Crackberry, a term that reflects the addicitive nature of PDA-based messaging and e-mail, is used to refer to both the PDAs and their users. The press release listed two other runner-up [...]

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Free Money? Just Say No!

19. October 2006

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I’m still catching up on the reading I missed during my extended trip (and posting hiatus) a few weeks ago, and one of the more interesting things I’ve run across is an article in the UK’s Times Online, Why say no to free money? It’s neuro-economics, stupid. The article describes an unusual variation on [...]

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Cruise Marketing and Neuroeconomics

17. October 2006

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One of the most successful sectors in the travel industry has been cruising. Megalines like Carnival and others are building ever-bigger ships to handle the increased traffic and offer more amenities. There’s no doubt that a good part of the success of the cruise industry is due to offering a product that people [...]

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Warranties, Neuromarketing, and Neuroeconomics

11. October 2006

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There’s a neuromarketing lesson in extended warranties. If you have purchased any kind of electronic product in the last few years, you were almost certainly offered an opportunity to extend the product’s warranty. Despite the fact that these are rarely great deals, many people purchase them. Often, the cost of the warranty [...]

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