J. Scott Armstrong

J. Scott Armstrong (born March 26, 1937) is an author, forecasting and marketing expert,^{[1][2] [3]} and a professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Education and background

Armstrong received his B.A. in applied science (1959) and his B.S. in industrial engineering (1960) from Lehigh University. In 1965, he received his M.S. in industrial administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1968.^[4] He has taught in Thailand, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Japan, and other countries.^[4]

Forecasting

Armstrong is the author of Long-Range Forecasting and the editor and co-author of Principles of Forecasting. He was a founder and editor of the Journal of Forecasting,^[5] and a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting.^[6]

Marketing and advertising

Armstrong's book Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. In it, Armstrong presents 194 principles designed to increase the persuasiveness of advertisements. The principles were derived from empirical data, expert opinion, and observation. They are organized and indexed under ten general principles (e.g. emotion, attention), and those ten principles are further grouped into three categories: strategy, general tactics, and media-specific tactics.^[7]

In 1989, a University of Maryland study ranked Armstrong among the top 15 marketing professors in the U.S. based on a study using peer ratings, citations, and publications.^[8] He serves or has served on editorial positions for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Research, Interfaces, and other journals. He was awarded the Society for Marketing Advances Distinguished Scholar Award for 2000.

Public Policy

Armstrong also has published several papers dealing with public policy issues ranging from the effectiveness of government mandated disclaimers the moral hazards of executive compensation.^[9] Armstrong argues that government mandated disclaimer can be ineffective or even harmful by encouraging negative behavior,^[10] perhaps by reducing the buyer’s sense of responsibility and care. Armstrong claims that the free market will fix labelling as sellers have a long-term interest to ensure the satisfaction of buyers and buyers themselves will seek to find out information about the product.

Climate change

In an article published in Energy & Environment, Armstrong claimed that the climate scientists have ignored the scientific literature on forecasting principles.^[11][12] Armstrong wrote, "When we inspected the 17 [forecasting] articles, we found that none of them referred to the scientific literature on forecasting methods. It is difficult to understand how scientific forecasting could be conducted without reference to the research literature on how to make forecasts. One would expect to see empirical justification for the forecasting methods that were used. We concluded that climate forecasts are informed by the modelers’ experience and by their models—but that they are unaided by the application of forecasting principles."^[11] Others have criticized Armstrong's applications of business forecasting methods to scientific projections as "too ambiguous and subjective to be used as a reliable basis for auditing scientific investigations."^[13] Climatologist Kevin Trenberth states that Armstrong's criticisms "overlooked the fact that [the IPCC reports] address many of the things he is critical of."^[14]

Armstrong extended a "Global Warming Challenge" to Al Gore in June 2007,^[15] in the style of the Simon–Ehrlich wager. Each side was to place $10,000 ($20,000 total) in trust, with the winner being determined by annual mean temperatures. Gore declined the wager, stating that he does not gamble.^[16] Climatologist Gavin Schmidt described Armstrong's wager as "essentially a bet on year to year weather noise" rather than climate change.^[17]

Armstrong has published articles and testified before Congress on forecasts of polar bear populations (testimony), arguing that previous estimates were too flawed to justify listing the bear as an endangered species.^[6][18][19] In an evaluation of Armstrong and other authors’ criticism of polar bear population forecasts, Amstrup and other authors concluded that all of the claims made by Armstrong were either mistaken or misleading.^[13]

Selected publications

Books

• Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles
• Long-Range Forecasting
• Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners

Papers

Forecasting

• Golden Rule of Forecasting: Be conservative. By adhering to cumulative knowledge about the situation and forecasting methods. Proposed 28 guidelines that logically follow this definition for conservatism.
• Simple versus complex forecasting: The evidence. Complexity increases forecast error by 27 percent on average in the 25 papers with quantitative comparisons.
• Fred Collopy, J. Scott Armstrong (1992), "Rule-Based Forecasting: Development and Validation of an Expert Systems Approach to Combining Time Series Extrapolations", Management Science, 38 (10), 1394–1414.
• J. Scott Armstrong, Fred Collopy (1992), "Error Measures for Generalizing about Forecasting Methods: Empirical Comparisons", International Journal of Forecasting, 8, 69–80.

Marketing

• Developed and validated the Persuasion Principles Audit to assess the persuasiveness of ads.
• J. Scott Armstrong (1991), "Prediction of Consumer Behavior by Experts and Novices", Journal of Consumer Research, 18 (September), 251–256.

Scientific methods

• J. Scott Armstrong, Robert J. Brodie, Andrew G. Parsons (2001), "Hypotheses in Marketing Science: Literature Review and Publication Audit", Marketing Letters, 12 (2),171–187.
• Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation. Obtained evidence of bias against the publication and citation of papers with controversial findings
• J. Scott Armstrong, Ruth A. Pagell (2003), "Reaping Benefits from Management Research: Lessons from the Forecasting Principles Project", Interfaces, 33 (6), 89–111.

Organizational Behavior

• The Ombudsman: Are Top Executives Paid Enough? An Evidence-Based Review. High pay and incentive payments for top executives are detrimental to firms, based on experimental evidence

Peer Review in Science

• Advocacy as a Scientific Strategy: The Mitroff Myth. Proposed a “results-blind reviewing” procedure for reviewing journal articles with controversial findings
• Is Review By Peers As Fair As It Appears? Showed that journal reviewing practices are neither objective nor fair. Proposed a procedure to increase the likelihood of publishing important papers.

Educational Method

• J. Scott Armstrong (2012), "Natural Learning in Higher Education", Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Heidelberg: Springer (2012)

Strategic Planning

• Formal planning improves organizational effectiveness paper1, paper2, paper3

Social Responsibility

• Social Irresponsibility in Management. Stakeholder role, in combination with social accounting, reduces socially irresponsible decisions
• Evidence on the Effects of Mandatory Disclaimers in Advertising. Government-mandated programs for social responsible behavior for firms are harmful: Based on our review of research on government-mandated or subsidized programs to promote social responsibility

Applied Statistics

• Illusions in Regression Analysis. Attempts to identify causality by using regression analysis of non-experimental data are typically detrimental
• Error Measures For Generalizing About Forecasting Methods: Empirical Comparisons. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): Conducted experiments and found that the RMSE is inappropriate for comparing forecasting methods; more appropriate measures were selected and are now used

Organizations

Armstrong is a founder or co-founder of these organizations

• Journal of Forecasting, founded 1982. 1982-83 citation impact factor 7th in business, management, and planning journals.
• International Journal of Forecasting, established 1985.
• International Institute of Forecasters, established 1982.
• International Symposium on Forecasting, annually since 1981.
• ForecastingPrinciples.com, founded 1997.
• PollyVote.com, founded 2004.
• TheClimateBet.com, 2007 challenge to Al Gore.
• AdPrin.com, founded 2000. 2004 MERLOT Award, “Best online learning resource business & management.”

Awards & Honors

• Selected as the inaugural lecturer for the “Armstrong Brilliance in Research in Marketing Award” (Hong Kong 2016)^[20]
• Named as one of the “25 Most Famous College Professors Teaching Today” ( 2010)
• Listed as one of the "55 of the Hottest, Smartest, Most Talked About College Professors." (2007)
• SMA/JAI Press Distinguished Scholar Award for 2000, 2000^[21]
• Silver Jubilee Lecturer for the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the College of Business at Massey University in New Zealand, 1998^[22]
• Honorary Fellow for “Distinguished Contributions to Forecasting” by the International Institute of Forecasters (1996)^[23]
• Ranked 15th among U. S. marketing professors based on peer ratings, citations, and publications (Kirkpatrick & Locke 1989^[24])

References

External links

Personal Site

• JScottArmstrong.com

Media

Interviews

• Alain Elkann Interview about Scott Armstrong's about life as a scientific skeptic. Motivated by the list of 25 Most Famous College Professors Teaching Today
• Interview of J. Scott Armstrong for the International Journal on Forecasting

News media

• Armstrong, J. Scott. "Improving Learning at Universities: Who is Responsible?", "University of Pennsylvania Alamanac", December 14, 2004. Accessed May 10, 2007.
• Kranish, Michael. "Flaws are found in validating medical studies", Boston Globe, August 15, 2005. Accessed May 10, 2007.
• Surowiecki, James. "In Praise of Third Place", The New Yorker, December 4, 2006. Accessed May 10, 2007.