John McCoy

Headshot of John McCoy

jpmccoy-at-wharton-dot-upenn-dot-edu

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, I'm also affiliated with the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, Penn's MindCORE hub and Wharton Human-AI Research.

Trained as a computational cognitive scientist, I study how people think and decide, and use this understanding to solve marketing problems.

I use a combination of behavioral experiments and formal modeling, drawing on ideas and techniques from psychology, economics, marketing, Bayesian statistics, and computer science.

Much of my research relates to two themes. The first involves how to elicit and aggregate beliefs and preferences, which is core to market research. One component of this theme is work on the "surprisingly popular" answer, which aggregates beliefs by incorporating predictions about the beliefs of others. The second involves what I call concept engineering - deliberately introducing or revising the concepts in people's heads using the tools of cognitive and behavioral science.

For more details, see my CV.

John McCoy's Google Scholar

John McCoy's LinkedIn page

Working papers

Selected research

Graph theory papers

I have written some papers in graph theory, mostly dealing with paired domination: