C.V.

Year: 2017

Leeds Business Insights comes to Denver (11/7)

Quick post: Last chance to RSVP for Leeds Business Insights event down in Denver tomorrow night (11/17/2017). Innovative research for real-world impact Leeds Business Insights is a series of speaking and networking engagements featuring today’s groundbreaking research that shapes tomorrow’s workplace. Come engage with your fellow alumni and our world-renowned faculty as they each share 15-minute […]

Nobel Prize inspired repost: Emotional Accounting

Inspired by Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize in Economics, here are a couple of old posts about emotional accounting–research that complements his work on mental accounting: Emotional Accounting Part 1 (complementing mental accounting): My good friend Jonathan Levav and I published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research that examines how people’s feelings about money influence their […]

A note from a comedian

A note from a comedian

I occasionally receive emails from (real) people commenting on the benign violation theory. Sometimes the message is critical. And sometimes complimentary. I received this message from a comedian (who asked to remain anonymous). It’s a thoughtful take connecting the theory to comedy: Dear Dr. McGraw — What interests me most about BVT (aside from its […]

Creative PhD students

I am teaching a PhD seminar on consumer and managerial decision making. I have a schedule conflict with an upcoming class. So, I asked the students to come up with a useful way to spend that time (until I can get the class rescheduled). Their first suggestion was to engage in formal hypothesis derivation of […]

Are you living in a simulation?

Are you living in a simulation?

Philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a paper that makes a fascinating suggestion: You could be living in a simulation. ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run […]

Dads, please keep telling dad jokes (NPR story)

Dads, please keep telling dad jokes (NPR story)

Happy Father’s Day. One of the nice things about doing humor research is that I get to do fun interviews with fancy media outlets, such as NPR. They called this week to talk about dad jokes. FULL ARTICLE. There is a tendency to make fun of dads and their jokes. However, one thing that came […]