A new blog as of 09/21/2011 —

This blog is about the Nobel Award in economics:  No marketing scholar has won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, largely because of an enormous bias against our field by the selection committee, whose members believe financial, environmental and trade issues are far more important than any marketing theory.  Over the years the Nobel prize was expanded to other academic fields including political science and psychology:  Hence, the award is termed the "Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences" (see www.nobelprize.org).  The closest marketing scholars can claim for the award in recent years is Daniel Kahneman for his work with Amos Tversky on Prospect Theory.  But I wonder if 'they' would have given the award to both authors if professor Tversky was still alive at the time.  I think the committee only votes for an award 'iff' one researcher is still living.  I was very happy when Herbert Simon won many years ago and John Nash and John Harsanyi won in 1994 (but they were not co-authors).  The singular marketing scholar to be nominated was Frank Bass (from his obituaries).  Frank Bass proposed a model of product adoption that engendered a lot of economic research, particularly in marketing ("A New Growth Model for Consumer Durables," Management Science, 1969).  I had the pleasure of knowing and working with a number of professor Bass's students, including Mark Moriarty, Mike Hanssens, and Kaz Takada.  I currently work with a second generation Bass student, Abhik Roy.

I met Frank on a couple of occasions:  first at a UC Riverside conference when I was a professor there and a second time at UC Berkeley for a Marketing Science conference.  On both occasions, he was not easy to converse with, but at least I got the impression he knew in his own mind what research was important and what research is simply 'fluff.'  Today, I believe the 'fluff' research largely appears in both Marketing Science and the Journal of Consumer Research.  The former journal seems to be now a captive of economic science.  By this, I mean unless an author or authors develop arcane mathematical models with arcane experiments (much like one would find in experimental or "behavioral' economics), they have no chance for publication.  The same occurs with JCR:  many of the published studies are so uninteresting (even for a psychologist) to be not worth reading.  Space doesn't permit the many examples from both journals.

Martin Fishbein should have won the Nobel in economic sciences for his "Theory of Reasoned Action."  He died a couple years ago.  His publication with Icek Ajzen (Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research, Addison-Wesley, 1975) stimulated a ton of research in Marketing on attitude theory:  including work by Joel Cohen, Richard Lutz, and many other marketing academics and their students (see Peter and Olson, Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy, McGraw-Hill).  I contrast Martin Fishbein's work historically with Keeney and Raiffa's (1975) seminal text on multi-attribute theory and models:  Anyone working with multi-attribute models (linear, logistic, or whatever), needs to acknowledge how Fishbein was able to discern the difference between beliefs and attribute evaluation (weights) as disaggregated terms in our present day prediction models.

Unlike my encounters with Frank Bass, I never met Martin Fishbein in person.  But I did sit in on 1970's era ACR session (Association of Consumer Research) in which professors Fishbein and Ajzen presented their view of how a theory of 'reasoned action' applied to a consumer's decision process.  As a young prof, I was quite impressed.  Little did I know, this would be for the next two decades the significant area of academic research in marketing.  Too bad the Nobel process missed these two scholars:  professors Bass and Fishbein.  (ed. note; a previous version of this blog implied that Fishbein's beliefs were the multi-attribute version of 'attribute weights.'  The opposite is the case:  evaluation is akin to Fisbein's belief system and attribute weights are akin to Fisbein's measure of 'like-dislike' evaluations of attributes.)