Farewell dinner

Gail, Shawn, Tonya, Karen and Alex were celebrating Alex's and my departure to Rhode Island (Alex) and San Jose, CA (Tobi). Food at Bizou at the Downtownmall in Charlottesville was great and it was a shame that we discovered the place on the last day here.

Temporary Housing (8/24/07 - 9/24/07)

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Process excellence <> Outcome

Bob Bruner, dean of Darden, visited the Boeing factory and reflects on what makes operations successful:

The ingenuity one observes in a visit to a plant like Boeing’s is a reminder that process excellence is a vital driver of high performance. This is a message that we emphasize in our courses at Darden. It is not sufficient to deliver a quality product; it takes quality processes to generate a sustainable competitive advantage.

Source: Bob Bruner, Dean of the Darden school

7.49 < 5.69: The Right Digit Effect

Based on research from Coulter is appears that consumers experience price-discounts greater based on the right digits of the price even in cases where the overall price might be higher:

We use four experiments to examine consumers' processing of comparative regular and sale price information in advertisements. Consistent with our hypothesized right digit effect, we find that, when consumers view regular and sale prices with identical left digits, they perceive larger price discounts when the right digits are "small" (i.e., less than 5) than when they are "large" (i.e., greater than 5). As a result, they may attribute greater value and increased purchase likelihood to higher-priced, lower-discounted items. We examine alternate processing explanations for this right digit effect, as well as the moderating impact of price presentation format.

KEITH S. COULTER, Journal of consumer research

"Illusion of truth" effect

Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this "illusion of truth" effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term but paradoxically made them more likely to remember it as true after a 3 day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself but decreased recollection of the claim's original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising.

Source: Ian Skurnik, Darden faculty

House hunting in Silicon Valley

I flew to SFO for a house hunting trip in and around Silicon Valley. There is a myriad of apartment complexes, houses and rental places. Random driving yields great success in finding the bigger complexes, craigslist is the means of choice to find rental places on the open market. Since I won't need an apartments before corporate housing ends in September I'm just driving around stopping here and there, taking a tour of a complex and moving on. It's a lot of fun and I even had the opportunity to stop by at a converted Seven-Eleven that become for a limited time a Kwik-E-Mart, known from the TV show The Simpsons.