Sequencing the Economic Genome of the Consumer Mind

Eugene Galanter Columbia University, Howard Moskowitz Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., Matthias Silcher Moskowitz Jacobs Inc.

Bentham eBooks – February 2011

eISBN: 978-1-60805-249-3, 2011

Aims and Scope

This book explores a variety of topics that can be called psychological economics. It demonstrates to the reader how to do straightforward experiments, to understand how people think about the economic aspects of their daily lives.

We look at how people react to aspects of their daily lives, what drives them to react, what are the issues that are most important, and how do they make decisions. We do so in the frame of systematic experimentation, using the methods of consumer research.

We do so in light of educating the reader how to do these experiments, what the results look like, what they imply. And then we teach the reader how to apply these ideas for new studies. In a sense, we are profoundly educating the reader into ‘how’ to do Psychological Economics, not just giving the reader an interesting trip through data and observations. We find that such approaches are popular, inspirational, and have a very ‘long tail’ in terms of interest among students, professionals, businesses world-wide, for years to come.

Fundamentally, we wish to combine three distinct areas (1-3) to create a world-class contribution to a new area, in a way that will remain au courant for a few decades:

1. The ‘very hot’ area of behavior economics, which up to now comprises books with short vignettes and descriptions of one-off experiments. These make good reading, but don’t found a science accessible to the reader.
2. Methods accessible to the reader, from start to finish, used by commercial researchers as well as policy researchers. These methods make the whole field of behavioral economics approachable by anyone.
3. Data which serve as the start of true, profound understanding. Rather than presenting data from simple one-off experiments, we present databases that can be understood by the reader and used as the foundation of the reader’s own work.
4. In a sense, we want to reproduce the successful formula embodied in Selling Blue Elephants:How to Make Great Products that People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them (Wharton School Publishing, 2007), which has been translated into 16 languages world-wide. We want to move beyond stories and intriguing conversation to the foundations of a science accessible to all world-wide.

Behavioral economics is the ‘hot new area’ of economics and consumer psychology. This book provides a comprehensive guide for how to do the work, types of results to obtain. The approach is becoming far more widespread around the world, thanks to the work of Dr. Howard Moskowitz, one of the authors, and the incredible success of Selling Blue Elephants. In other words, the book is just slightly ahead of a sea change in the field, and may be one of the ‘tipping points’. Coincidentally, Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, is a big fan of Dr. Moskowitz (see www.SellingBlueElephants.com; look at the video of Malcolm talking about these approaches).