Aristotle’s Anxiety: Choosing Among Methods to Study Choice
Published 2/1/2009
Author: William Hedgcock and Akshay R. Rao
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Executive Summary
In Hedgcock and Rao (2009), the authors employ functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to examine whether trade-off aversion as manifested in differential amygdala activation is a plausible theoretical explanation for the attraction effect. In two commentaries on that research, Huettel and Payne (2009) and Yoon, Gonzales, and Bettman (2009) offer several thoughtful, provocative, and constructive observations, both on the particular theoretical issue and on technical aspects of cognitive neuroscience–based approaches to studying consumer decision making. In this rejoinder, the authors address three important issues raised in the commentaries; in so doing, they expand on the original conceptual framework and offer an assessment of whether and how neuroscientific techniques might be employed in the study of consumer choice in particular and consumer behavior in general.
Biography
William Hedgcock is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Iowa. He received a BA in Economics and a BA in Psychology from Macalester College and his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Hedgcock conducts research in the areas of decision neuroscience and behavioral decision theory. He uses choices, response time analysis, and brain imaging techniques to study cognitive functions while people make decisions.
Akshay R. Rao holds the General Mills Chair in Marketing and is director of the Institute for Research in Marketing in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He has a bachelor’s degree in Economics (honors) from Madras University in India, an MBA from Xavier Institute in India, and a PhD in Marketing from Virginia Tech. A winner of the 1987 Robert Ferber Award and the 2000 Harold H. Maynard Award, he has published his research on pricing and brand management in various scholarly journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as well as in managerially oriented journals, such as Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. For the 1993–1994 academic year, he was a Visiting Professor at MIT, and in 2000–2001 and 2007–2008, he was a Visiting Professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Science & Technology. He currently serves on the editorial review board of Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology.
J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 1, February 2009
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