Dale W. Griffin
Advisory Council Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior, UBC Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia
bio:
Dale Griffin is a professor of Marketing and Behavioural Sciences and former Director of the Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. He has taught at leading universities in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, most recently at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Professor Griffin teaches courses in Consumer Behavior, Marketing Research, and Strategic Decision Making at the MBA and PhD levels, and lectures on risk management and financial decision-making for executive audiences.
Professor Griffin received his PhD from Stanford University, supervised by Lee Ross and Amos Tversky. His undergraduate degree is from UBC, where he worked with Daniel Kahneman. He has received both the UBC Sauder senior research prize and the UBC Hampton research prize for his work exploring how consumers and managers make decisions. His papers have received over 23,000 citations, with more than 50 paper receiving at least 50 citations. His current research focuses on measuring risk across financial and medical settings, and consumer responses to pricing strategies.
More info at https://www.sauder.ubc.ca/people/dale-griffin.
3 questions:
What aspects of this research agenda are you most excited about?
There is a lot that I am excited about in this research partnership—the topics, the team, and the approaches are fantastic—but if I have to choose one it would be the team: A mix of dedicated scholars and future-oriented organizations. Even the meetings are going to be great fun!
Of all the work you have done, what project / paper is your personal favourite and why?
What a hard question, because research questions and projects are bound up with people and research partners, and I have been so privileged to work with some great minds. One of the more unusual papers—but still one I’m proud of—is a chapter with Danny Kahneman where we ponder whether the study of heuristics and biases is inconsistent with, or incompatible with, a positive psychology approach emphasizing human strengths (we think not!).
Which is the one paper or book that you wish you had written (but have not)?
Now that is a long list! One paper that immediately comes to mind is very relevant to this project—Richard Thaler’s relatively early paper (1980) on a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice. This paper essentially introduce Kahneman and Tversky’s work to Economics and was the seed from which Behavioral Economics grew. But more than that, it is a beautiful example of story-telling in a scholarly way.