Research
The overall theme of the research at the Center for Media and Economic Psychology concerns psychological aspects of behavior of different kinds of economic actors - individuals as well as organizational actors. This means that the studies contribute to research and practice of management, leadership and individuals in organizations and society.
- The History of the Swedish Advertising Industry 1915-1990
Researchers: Erik Lakomaa, Elin Åström-Rudberg & Richard Wahlund (Project together with EHFF)
The project explores the transformation of the Swedish advertising industry (i.e. the advertising agencies) from its infancy to the emergence of digital advertising channels. The project focuses on the development of the industry and how the advertising agencies responded to the introduction of new media (radio, television), new technology (offset printing, desktop publishing, computer aided direct mail), and new markets (the state as advertiser).
- The Economic Value of Open Data
Researchers: Erik Lakomaa with Jan Kallberg, University of Texas at Dallas and U.S. Military Academy, West Point.
The goal of the project is to estimate the societal benefits and costs of disseminating PSI (especially GEO/GIS-Data) as Open Data.
Publications:
Lakomaa, Erik, and Jan Kallberg (2013). "Open data as a foundation for innovation: The enabling effect of free public sector information for entrepreneurs." IEEE Access 1 (2013): 558-563.
Kallberg, Jan, and Erik Lakomaa (2106). "Institutional Maximization and Path Dependency: The Delay of Implementation of the European Union Public Sector Information Directive in Sweden." JeDEM-eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government 8.1 (2016): 84-101.
Lakomaa, Erik (2013). Öppna data öppnar möjligheter: informationsdrivna tjänster för den offentliga sektorn. In P. Anderson, Axelsson, B., Rosenqvist; C. (Ed.), Det mogna tjänstesamhällets förnyelse (pp. 335-347). Lund: Studentlitteratur.
- The Political Economy of IT-security, Data Protection and Consumer Rights
Researchers: Erik Lakomaa & Richard Wahlund.
The project goal is to examine the role of institutions in shaping IT-security and data protection policies with special emphasis on the impact on consumer rights.
Publication:
Wahlund, R., et al. (2016). Anseenderisker och dataskydd. Risker och riskhantering i näringsliv och samhälle. R. Wahlund. Stockholm Stockholm School of Economics 95-134.
- The analyses of phenomena in sports by using theoretical perspectives of economic-psychology, quantitative methods and sports data
Researchers: Dr. Patric Andersson, associate professor, Stockholm School of Economics and Gustav Almqvist, doctoral student, Stockholm School of Economics.
Sports is associated with a rich amount of data that permit rigorous analyses of behavior and performance on individual level as well as team level. Such analyses is not only beneficial in order to gain competitive advantages in the game of sports, betting or other sports-related issues, but also give important insights that are scientifically relevant to business studies, economics, psychology, and other disciplines. This new strand of research is often refer to as sports analytics. In this project, we rely on quantitative methods and sports data to analyze behavior and performance in sports as well as blend theories from economics and psychology for the purpose of investigating phenomena in regard to behavioral decision-making and judgmental forecasting.
Publications:
Andersson, P, D. Memmert, & Popowicz. (2009). Forecasting outcomes of the World Cup 2006 in football: Performance and confidence of bettors and naïve laypeople. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 1, 116-123.
Andersson, P., Ayton, P., & Schmidt, C. (2008). The economics and psychology of football. Myth and facts about the world’s greatest sport. Cambridge Scholar Press.
Andersson, P. (2007). Är oddssättare tillförlitliga? En analys av precisionen hos oddsen i fotbolls-VM. [Are odds-setters overconfident: An analysis of the precision of the odds in World Cups in football] Ekonomisk Debatt 35, 42 – 54.
Andersson, P., Edman, J., & Ekman, M. (2005). Predicting the World Cup 2002: Performance and confidence of experts and non-experts. International Journal of Forecasting 21, 565-576. [ABS 3]
- Making private decisions about funds: The role of presentation format and the information use
Researchers: Dr. Patric Andersson, associate professor, Stockholm School of Economics; Gustav Almqvist, doctoral student, Stockholm School of Economics; and Professor Richard Wahlund, Stockholm School of Economics.
Drawing from cutting-edge research in psychology and behavioral finance and the use of multiple methods like experiments, surveys and verbal protocols, this project aims to empirically investigate how private investors evaluate funds, perceive risks, and make decisions about funds as well as to what extent they are affected by the format of how information is presented and other factors. Financial support has been gratefully been received by Handelsbankens Research Foundations.
Publication:
Andersson, P., & Almqvist. (2016). Presentationsformatets betydelse vid kommunikation av risk. Ur R.Wahlund (Red.) Risker och riskhantering i näringsliv och samhälle. Stockholm: Studentlitteratur. - The psychology of betting: The existence and non-existence of cognitive fallacies among bettors
Researchers: Dr. Patric Andersson, associate professor, Stockholm School of Economics; Gustav Almqvist, doctoral student, Stockholm School of Economics; and Dr. Håkan Nilsson, associate professor, Dept. Psychology, Uppsala University.
Stimulated by recent trends in psychological research in judgment and decision-making, the project aims to study empirically whether and how cognitive fallacies influence punters when they evaluate bets on sports outcome.
Publications:
Andersson, P. & Nilsson, H. (2015). Do Bettors Correctly Perceive Odds? Three Studies of How Bettors Interpret Betting Odds as Probabilistic Information. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 28, 331-346.
Andersson, P., & Nilsson, H. (2015). Hur bra är spelkonsumenter på att skatta sannolikheter för sportspel med odds? En beslutspsykologisk analys. Lotterinspektionens Skriftserie 7, 4-17.
Nilsson, H., & Andersson, P. (2010). Making the Seemingly Impossible Appear Possible: Effects of Conjunction Fallacies in Evaluations of Bets on Football Games. Journal of Economic Psychology 31, 172-180. - Corporate Image and Employer Branding
Researchers: Professor Richard Wahlund, PhD Emre Yildiz
Corporate Image is the result of branding endeavors, in other words how a brand is perceived by different stakeholders (customers, investors, suppliers, personnel and potential employees etc.). Employer branding focuses on how a company or other organization is perceived as an employer, i.e. just a special case of branding in general. The project started in 1990 with a study of how SSE students perceived different companies and other organizations as employers and what explained these images, a study which has then been repeated annually, although with changed content now and then over the years. See links for some of these reports. Later on a special study was carried out by Per Håkansson and Richard Wahlund focusing on the brand strategies for creating corporate image in general.
In later years a couple of Master thesis has been written related to the project, focusing on employer branding in different industries, and branding of universities and their educational programs.
Right now is an experimental study carried out in cooperation with researchers in other countries, focusing on employer branding.
Publications:
Håkansson, P. och R. Wahlund (1996). Varumärken – Från teori till praktik. Stockholm: Fonden för Handels- och Distributionsforskning.
Wahlund, R. (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). The Stockholm School of Economics Employer Image Barometer 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015/2016. Concerning SSE students' interest in different employers, industries, countries, employment conditions and working in their own businesses. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.
Wahlund, R. (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). Handelshögskolans Imagebarometer 2003 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006 / 2007 / 2008 / 2009. Om Handelshögskolestudenternas intresse för olika arbetsgivare, branscher, länder, anställningsförhållanden samt eget företagande. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.
Wahlund, R. (2002). Handelshögskolans Imagebarometer 2001 med särskild fokusering på rekrytering av civilekonomer. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.
Wahlund, R. (2001). The year 2000 EMPLOYER IMAGE BAROMETER of SSE. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.
Wahlund, R. (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998). Handelshögskolans Imagebarometer 1990 / 1991 / 1992 / 1993 / 1994 / 1995 / 1996 / 1997 / 1998 med särskild fokusering på rekrytering av civilekonomer. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm. - The Future of News Journalism in the Digital World
Researchers: Richard Wahlund, Emelie Fröberg, Adam Åbonde, Mattias Svahn, Jonas Colliander, Karina T. Liljedal
The project is motivated by the great impact that digitization have had on the media industry. This project aims to explore how individuals engage in news consumption in the new digital era. One part of the project is to examine actual behavior of media users relying on large datasets of individuals’ digital traces. - Private traders and the role of emotions
Researchers: Patric Andersson, Emelie Fröberg, Martin Berlin (SOFI, Stockholm University)
The project aims to explore the role of emotions in decision-making and performance among private active traders (i.e. people that make investment decisions frequently and with their private capital). Methods are experience sampling, surveys, transaction data and market data on an individual level. - Information acquisition and performance of active equity fund managers
Researchers: Emelie Fröberg
Fröberg (2016) explored (1) how individual fund managers that actively manage equity funds acquire information, (2) relationships between information acquisition behavior, risk attitude and beliefs about market behavior, and (3) the impact on fund performance. A follow-up study was conducted in late 2016 thanks to data provided by Morningstar, focusing further on information acquisition behavior among fund managers.
Publications:
Fröberg, E. (2016). Seeking Alpha–and finding it : empirical studies of the impact of information acquisition behavior, market beliefs, and risk attitude on fund performance among equity fund managers in Sweden. Doctoral Dissertation. Stockholm: Handelshögskolan i Stockholm
- Social Interdependence Skill
Researchers: Per Henrik Hedberg
Humans are “an obligately interdependent species” (Caporael, 1997). It has even been proposed that the evolutionary pressure for this ability explains the growth in the human brain and intelligence (Dunbar, 1993; Humphrey, 1976), and a “Machiavellian” hypothesis has been proposed as a colorful label (Christie & Geis, 1970). In this project, we investigate individual differences in this ability, which we call “social interdependence skill” or SIS in short. We have found that it predicts one of the most basic outcomes in business: negotiation success. Here is the abstract for our first paper in this project, which is currently under review.
One Step Ahead in the Game: Predicting Negotiation Outcomes with Measures of Social Interdependence Skill
Lay intuition suggests that some people are better at strategic social interaction than are others. Nonetheless, identifying reliable predictors of individual differences in negotiation performance has turned out to be a non-trivial task. Here we hypothesized that individuals’ understanding the structure of socially interdependent situations, and best responding to others’ likely behavior in such situations, are social-interdependence skills that should be predictive of their negotiation performance. We adapted existing and novel guessing-games to operationalize these skills. In three studies with students and business executives, performance in these social guessing games predicted better individual outcomes and better joint outcomes in negotiations. Measures of general mental ability did not account for the results. Potential implications for negotiations as well as larger-scale phenomena are discussed.
- A memory approach to subtle gender discrimination
Researchers: Per Henrik Hedberg, Marie Gustafsson-Sendén, Torun Lindholm
Whom are we willing to rely on for our beliefs? One of the central findings of social psychology is that when people lack immediate physical evidence to base their beliefs on, they rely instead on other people’s opinions or beliefs, thereby establishing a “social reality” of shared beliefs with the other people (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine, 2009; Festinger, 1950, 1954; cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1966). We investigate a form of non-hostile discrimination that involves the formation of such shared beliefs. This type of discrimination consists in the exclusion of some people from social construction processes that can yield commonly shared beliefs. That is to say, people may be more or less disposed to internalize another person’s beliefs after communication with that person, depending on the social category of the person. Such discrimination is difficult to detect for everyone involved because it does not manifest itself in hostility or dislike—in fact, as we show with the important case of gender, it appears that while women tend to be liked better than men, their beliefs are often given less credence.
- Sustainable Business: Reputational Risks and Opportunity Management
- Diversity and Gender Equality
- Employee opinion surveys: theory and methods
- Technological and Institutional Change in the Media Industry
- Media Issues in Marketing Communications
- Marketing via Pervasive Games
- The Psychology of Decision Making – Studies of Cognitive Biases
- Economic Expectations