Blog
Everyone involved in Dan Ariely’s fake data scandal now has an alibi—except for Ariely himself
In the fall of 2021, Dan Ariely, the most famous marketing professor in the world, was caught with fake data. A prominent study about how to make people more honest by signing at the top of the document included data from an insurance company that was obviously tampered with. This is a paper that was…
UCLA Professor Refuses to Cover for Dan Ariely in Issue of Data Provenance
In one of the more bizarre twists of the Dan Ariely saga, there is a huge issue of provenance in one of Dan Ariely’s studies. The study in question is Dan Ariely’s Ten Commandments study at JMR. The hugely impactful paper has over 3,000 citations but unfortunately failed to replicate in a large-scale systematic replication…
Scientific journal with 3.4% replication rate refuses to retract deeply anomalous papers by associate editor
The Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) is widely considered to be the most prestigious journal in consumer behavior, a sub-field of marketing. Despite perceptions of prestige, JCR is plagued with problems. In addition to the high degree of bias that can be seen in forensic meta-analyses of its papers, JCR’s replication rate is an abysmal…
Following a failure to replicate, “Super Size Me” paper turns out to be full of numerical inconsistencies
When Tunca, Ziano and Xu (2022) set out to replicate Dubois et al. (2012), they had no idea that their efforts would lead to the original authors requesting retraction of the original study. The original study claimed that consumers view larger food options to be a status signal. For example, consider the picture above. Look…
Reviewing Pham’s “feeling the future” paper to illustrate how easy it is to unintentionally p-hack
Context: Michel Pham has responded to Krefeld-Schwalb and Scheibehenne (2022) “Tighter Nets for Smaller Fishes” paper in a way that I believe fails to acknowledge how widespread p-hacking is and how easy it is to fall into that trap. Thus in response I’ve attempted to show how he may have p-hacked his own 2012 paper…
What kind of p-values should we expect from true effects?
There has been a lot of discussion around what is mathematically, theoretically possible in terms of p-values. If you have .01 < p < .05 is that mathematically possible for true effects? Yes. Can you get the same thing several times in a row? Mathematically speaking it’s possible, even if unlikely. But I would like…
How to quickly and easily make a customer heatmap with R
This is a good task for a marketing analytics course. It’s very easy to map out where customers are coming from. Why would you do that? So many reasons! So you know where to market to, where to add new locations, etc. This simple code below uses R software. Acknowledgment: I used some code from…
2022 marketing metascience year in review
First, definitely check out the 2021 marketing metascience year in review if you haven’t yet. This is an update of that review. Let’s get into it! Just like 2021, 2022 has brought a deluge of new replications and bias studies, which is great because there had been very little effort to test the trustworthiness of…
Three strikes for marketing professor, Nicolas Guéguen (but he doesn’t appear to be out)
Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing professor at Université Bretagne Sud, now holds the title for most retractions of any currently working marketing professor with three. In honor of this occasion, I’ve created this catalog of all the articles about marketing’s most notorious professor who is still employed in the field. In addition to three retractions, Guéguen…
You are right that we shouldn’t expect marketing studies to replicate (but I disagree about the reason)
Some deep thinkers in marketing have postulated that perhaps marketing studies are not replicable because of the ever-shifting context around consumption. This is an interesting and valid theory that has some merit. Certainly, the context has changed. There has been a tremendous shift in how we consume and what media we are exposed to in…
Dan Ariely claims authorship order shields him from blame; speculates that a low-level envelope stuffer committed the fraud
If you haven’t heard, world-famous marketing professor, Dan Ariely, was caught with fake data in fall of 2021. I’m not saying that he faked the data but he hasn’t done anything yet (show evidence, explain what happened, etc.) that would make anybody think it was someone else. Well in June of 2022, he finally did…
Replications in Marketing: Myth and Reality
Third-party replication is the foundation of good science. Without replication, how can we know if a scientific finding is even true? Moreover, if an entire field loses its sanity and commences in the wide-scale production of false knowledge, how would we know without replication? In order to help emphasize the usefulness of replications in marketing,…
