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 tackle 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 the elicitation and aggregation of beliefs, preferences and other mental constructs, 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 and studies how to deliberately introduce new concepts, or revise existing ones, using the tools of cognitive and behavioral science.
See also my papers organized by these themes, with a short description of each paper.
For more details, see my CV.