Mapping Out Marketing

ENTRY #6     How can you capture data that reflects complex life decisions?

Fred M. Feinberg

Handleman Professor of Marketing and Professor of Statistics, Ross School of Business and Department of Statistics, University of Michigan

Over the past few decades, decision researchers—psychologists, statisticians, economists, sociologists—have fashioned a comprehensive, if patchwork, theory of how people make choices. It goes roughly like so: faced with an impending decision, we cobble together an index of each option’s attractiveness, then select the seemingly best among them. We do this with lots of missing or inaccurate information, under time, ...