Numbers 101

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As a marketing professor who studies consumer behavior, I've spent the better part of the past decade thinking about how consumers process numerical information—everything from rankings to ratings to prices. We encounter numbers everywhere, and there are so many fascinating quirks—what psychologists refer to as heuristics and biases—that affect how we respond to the numerical information in our environment.

Numbers convey magnitude but also meaning. For example, a consumer might infer that a product whose retail price ends in 9 is on sale or a good value. Numbers may also be organized, categorized, or framed in different ways that affect preferences and choices. For example, the fraction 2/5 and the percentage 40% are equivalent but may have differential effects on consumers' information processing and their subsequent judgments and behaviors.

I envision this page as a place to share some of my own musings on numbers, categories, and lists. I also plan to provide my take on interesting readings or academic articles that relate to numerical cognition, including but not limited to research on behavioral pricing, ratings/rankings, online-review metrics, information framing, psychometrics, commissions/payouts, goal pursuit, prediction making, risk assessment, and financial decision making.

In this first post, I also wanted to let any fellow academics out there know about a conference on numerical markers that will be held at the University of Arizona this September. This is a Society of Consumer Psychology boutique conference organized by the fantastic team of Anastasiya Ghosh, Elise Ince, and Rajesh Bagchi. If you conduct research on numbers, I encourage you to submit your work and attend. (There is a max capacity of 40 attendees.) The organizers are holding a webinar about the conference on April 9, 2021.; you can learn more on the conference website.

If you have comments or suggestions about this blog, please be in touch. Thanks for reading and for your interest.