Special Issue Editors' Statement: Helping Consumers Help Themselves

Abstract

John G. Lynch Jr. is Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing, Fuqua School of Business (e-mail: john.lynch@duke.edu), and Wendy Wood is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, Professor of Marketing, and Codirector of the Social Science Research Institute (e-mail: wendy.wood@duke.edu), Duke University. The authors thank the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, for financial support for a conference at Duke in May 2005, in which these articles were originally presented and discussed. They also thank the discussants at the conference who provided thoughtful commentary on the articles appearing in this special issue (including Kathryn Aikin, Pankaj Aggarwal, Tim Buthe, Noel Brewer, Bob Giloth, John Herrera, Loraine LauGesk, Alan Levy, Patrick Malone, Danny McGoldrick, Joseph Mulholland, Mike Munger, Jan Pappalardo, David Pizarro, Daniel Rodriguez, and Kevin Schulman) and Eldar Shafir who commented on a draft of this introduction. They especially appreciate JPP&M editor Joel Cohen, who offered them the opportunity to serve as guest editors of this special issue and provided many instructive comments on this editorial and other articles in the special issue that helped them and the contributing authors better understand the policy environment. This special issue of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing addresses the theme “Helping Consumers Help Themselves: Improving the Quality of Judgments and Choices,” and it is motivated by Editor Joel Cohen’s desire to bring psychological theory to bear on public policy and public policy research. His premise is that public policy in the United States and internationally is dominated by the disciplines of economics and law. In the corridors of power, however, there is little parallel discussion of useful complementary perspectives drawing on psychological theory and research. This special issue is intended to start conversations between policy makers and psychologists, behavioral economists, and consumer behavior scholars whose work challenges key assumptions in standard policy analyses. The articles in this issue center on three key interventions to public policy that are drawn from economics and that are intended to benefit consumers in the marketplace: