Business and Ethics / People of SUMarketing Professor Debuts Blog at Psychology TodayNo Author ProvidedMarch 12, 2021Invalid ImageNo Image Credit ProvidedNo Caption ProvidedIn "All Things Numbered," Mathew Isaacs, PhD, the Genevieve Albers Professor of Marketing in the school of Albers School of Business and Economics, will write about the psychology of numbers, categories and lists."As a marketing professor who studies consumer behavior, I've spent the better part of the past decade thinking about how consumers process numerical information--everything from rankings to ratings to prices," says Isaac in the introduction of his new blog, All Things Numbered, on the website of the popular magazine Psychology Today. "We encounter numbers everywhere, and there are so many fascinating quirks (which psychologists refer to as heuristics and biases) that affect how we respond to the numerical information in our environment," says Isaac. "Numbers convey magnitude but also meaning--for example, a consumer might infer that a product whose retail price ends in 9 is 'on sale' or a 'good value.'" Isaac also writes that "numbers may also be organized, categorized or framed in different ways that affect preferences and choices--for example, the fraction 2/5 and the percentage 40% are equivalent but they may have differential effects on consumers' information processing and their subsequent judgments and behaviors."