Prof. Abbie Griffin (University of Utah)

Program

Date: December 1st, 2016
Time: 10.30 - 12 noon
Location: Ludwigstr. 28, BG, room 211b
Title: Are Innovation Project Selection Decision-Makers Biased Towards High-End Projects?

Abstract:

Managerial decision making idiosyncrasies continue to be pressing issues for academia and practice. Building on implicit attitude theory and evolutionary psychology, we hypothesize that innovation and new product development decision-makers implicitly prefer high-end over low-end innovation projects and that these implicitly held attitudes affect explicit investment decisions. We also argue that firms introduce more high-end than low-end products despite no clear, objective advantage for high-end products. Two experiments and secondary data from consumer packaged goods provide substantial evidence for these hypotheses and thus the existence of a high-end innovation project selection bias. This research extends the existing literature showing that implicit attitudes cause discrimination against people of lesser means by also discriminating against developing low-end project ideas and products, which again may have negative effects for those consumers of lesser means.