Aaron Charlton

No, they're not random. The true replicability of the median marketing study is currently unknown. But it's not a good sign that only 5 studies have so far successfully replicated.

Some of my favorite books I've read recently:
- Becoming Trader Joe
- Nimitz at War
I like biographies. I can hardly get through a whole book that doesn't have a good story.

The flow of replications has really been cut off. Only one was posted in 2024 and zero in 2023. I'm not going to speculate as to why (but please feel free to speculate or comment if you know!).

I've updated the marketing replication tracker through 2024. So far, 5 out of 45 (11%) of all direct replications of marketing studies (studies published in scientific marketing journals such as Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research). openmkt.org/research/rep...

Marketing journals are openly in conflict with the COPE standards they agreed to because they don't allow anonymous fraud reports. Too bad there are no enforcement mechanisms. Anybody can sign it then just not abide by it I guess.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, says Ioannidis, with ensuing confusion and disappointment.

Ioannidis had his 'Why most published research findings are false' paper out in 2005 which overlaps with the 12-year period between publication and retraction of Wakefield's MMR-autism study. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Lancet retracts 12-year-old article linking autism to MMR vaccines

This is just speculation because I wasn't in science back then, but I wonder if there were spillover effects from medical research. Andrew Wakefield had his infamous MMR-Autism article retracted in 2010. Wakefield was more of a saga (still ongoing) than an event. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

If you had to cite an event that opened the "replication crisis" era, what would you point to?

The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger The rot runs deeper than almost anyone has guessed.

Engber posted a gift link that is not paywalled: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

The less you mention scientific misconduct in the policy, the better. It should be focused on errors, questions about data provenance, conflicts of interest, plagiarism (whether intentional or not), etc. It should not hinge on a reading of the author's mind to see if their intentions were pure.

One thing I hate about marketing journals is they expect people to prove scientific misconduct, which means showing evidence of motive, before they'll consider a retraction. Ridiculous! If the paper is fatally flawed, just retract it. Who cares about the author's motives?

a man in a black and white sweater is standing in a clothing store and says obviously ALT: a man in a black and white sweater is standing in a clothing store and says obviously

Second, when we say "as predicted" what we really mean is I just thought this up on the fly to explain some noise in my data. How do people not know this?

First of all, let's talk about this idea that people are faking up their data. Well, who hasn't fudged a few numbers here or there. It's not like anybody's reading this stuff anyway.

What I learned from Analyzing 35,000 1-Star Reviews of Doctors' Offices charltondigital.com/what-i-learn...

I have a colada post coming on the interpretability of D+ and D- in the KS test. Seems nobody thinks of those values as particularly useful but they are. Any exceptions I should be aware of? Has anyone proposed they are interesting estimators on their own rather that mere test statistics?

Super excited about this opportunity to present my research (with Bart de Langhe and Phil Fernbach) on the risks of using marketing personas in segmentation analysis!

Join us on Jan 9th at 12PM ET, register here: www.msi.org/events/msi-w...

The grad student blaming himself for not being able to replicate a famous psychology/cog-sci study

‘Super Size Me’: What happened when marketing researchers ordered a double retraction? Gaurav Mishra via Flickr A year after the authors of two papers contacted the marketing journal where they had been published requesting retraction, the journal has pulled one, but decided to issue…

‘Super Size Me’: What happened when marketing researchers ordered a double retraction?

retractionwatch.com/2023/11/09/s...

@aaroncharlton.bsky.social is not happy

The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers When Francesca Gino, a rising academic star, was accused of falsifying data — about how to stop dishonesty — it didn’t just torch her career. It inflamed a crisis in behavioral science.

Anyone else think it was weird that NYTimes called Francesca Gino a Harvard professor, but Professors Nelson (Berkeley), Simmons (Wharton) and Simonsohn (ESADE) are "bloggers"?

www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/b...

Translation: Our literature has no foundation.

Part 3: Falsified Data and Error in Andrew Wakefield's 1998 (Retracted) Vaccine-Autism Study www.awayclinic.com/post/falsifi...

Part 3: Falsified Data and Error in Andrew Wakefield's 1998 (Retracted) Vaccine-Autism Study www.awayclinic.com/post/falsifi...

A Post Mortem on the Gino Case | The Organizational Plumber My perspective on the Gino-Ariely scandal, and what we should learn from it.

Zoé Ziani (who isn't on BlueSky AFAICT) has posted a long post-mortem on the Gino-Ariely case.

She explains how she came to suspect Gino’s work, the resistance she met during her Ph.D., her experience working with Data Colada, and the lessons business academia should learn from these scandals...

I'm sorry, but this anonymous op-ed from seven tenured professors at Harvard Business School re: the Gino case is the most chicken-shit use of tenure I have ever seen. It worsens my already poor assessment of HBS/Harvard www.thecrimson.com/article/2023...

I'll share a new chart here each day.

Today's chart:

The number of polio cases worldwide has been pushed down enormously over decades.

2 out of 3 strains of wild poliovirus have already been eradicated globally (in 2015 and 2019).

But there's still a challenge ahead. /1

We had a case of vaccine-derived paralytic polio in the U.S. last year. The unvaccinated man who got it never left the country but had been at a large gathering. www.chop.edu/news/2022-ny...

If you’re interested in joining our ECR meta-science event on 26th October in Amsterdam, please sign up by Thursday (12th October)!

Sign-up form:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Part 2: Twelve Autistic Children Went through Hell to Be Part of Andrew Wakefield's Retracted 1998 Study www.awayclinic.com/post/twelve-...

I'm doing a series of short blog posts for about the Andrew Wakefield "vaccine-autism" hoax/grift. Part 1 focuses on the conflicts of interest. Wakefield was paid by a lawyer to find the problems so he could sue big pharma.
www.awayclinic.com/post/andrew-...

Just finished editing Wikipedia. Another of Dan Ariely's stories has fallen apart. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...