User:Kyda6468/John G. Lynch

John G. Lynch
John G. Lynch, Jr. is an American marketing professor and [|consumer behavior] scholar. He is a Distinguished Professor in the University of Colorado System and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Biography
Lynch received his BA in economics, his MA in psychology, and his Ph.D. in psychology, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a member of the faculty at the University of Florida from 1979-1996, where he was Graduate Research Professor. From 1996-2009 he was the Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Lynch joined the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2009. He was the founding Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. Along with Donald Lichtenstein, he was the founding co-chair of the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, which has played a central role in creating an interdisciplinary forum for scholars and practitioners focussed on consumer financial decision-making -- how consumers make decisions about their money. Lynch is a member of the Academic Research Council of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Lynch is a Fellow of the American Marketing Association, Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association/Society for Consumer Psychology. He has been a recipient of the and the Society for Consumer Psychology's Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award and the Paul D. Converse Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Science of Marketing.

Research
Lynch studies the cognitive psychology of consumer decision-making, with a recent focus on consumer financial decision-making. In addition to studying consumer decision-making, Lynch’s Lynch's work concerns validity issues in research methodology. His early work with colleagues at the University of Florida focused on consumer decision making, illuminating the psychology that determines what brands or alternatives are considered and what characteristics of those alternatives are used to choose from the consideration set. His work at Duke on internet marketing created a conceptual roadmap for research in this field about why consumers, retailers, and manufacturers would choose internet channels versus selling by brick and mortar retailing. That work predicted many facets of how internet retailing evolved over the next twenty years and contradicted prevailing wisdom about whether internet shopping would lead to disintermediation of retailers and to greatly intensified price competition.

At the University of Colorado, Lynch started a new program of research on consumer financial decision making and led the way in developing what has become a large interdisciplinary field studying this topic. Consumer welfare is strongly affected by household financial decisions large and small: choosing mortgages; saving to fund a college education or retirement; using credit cards to fund current consumption; choosing how to “decumulate” savings in retirement; deciding how to pay for health care and insurance; and investing in the stock market. In all of these domains, consumers are often poorly informed and susceptible to making serious errors that have large personal and societal consequences. Fernandes, Lynch, and Netemeyer (2014) studied the effects of financial education and financial literacy on financial behavior. They performed a meta-analysis of 201 studies to determine whether measured financial literacy or manipulated financial education correlated with financial behavior. In the 90 experimental and quasi-experimental studies, financial education interventions explained, on average, 0.1% of the variance in the financial behavior variables. Because of the large sample size, the effect was statistically significant but extremely small in magnitude. The authors found that for financial interventions occurring shortly before measuring a financial behavior, interventions with more contact hours had bigger effects but the longer the time-lapse after the educational intervention, the less the effect on financial behavior even for interventions with many hours of financial education. This led them to argue that financial education interventions should be “just in time” and narrowly focussed on a specific behavior that the student will have a chance to enact soon thereafter. Other meta-analyses have similarly shown larger effects of financial education at a “teachable moment” defined by Miller et al. (2014) as an intervention “directly linked to behavior/action soon to take place.” Broad-based generic classroom instruction that is intended to be used years later has weak effects. Ward and Lynch (2019) extended the point that financial information is ignored and not retained unless consumers think that they need to know it, producing an increasing gap over time between the financial literacy of the household’s CFO who handles money matters and the non-CFO who relies on the partner.

A number of Lynch’s publications analyze research methodology, relating the classic Cook and Campbell’s (1979) distinctions among [|internal validity], [|external validity] , construct validity and confounding [19], and statistical conclusion validity. . Lynch’s overarching theme has been to dispute conventional wisdom that the validity of research conclusions depends primarily on adherence to textbook methodological prescriptions. Instead, he has shown that when researchers’ study designs and findings draw criticism, critiques often stem from the inevitable incompleteness of the researcher’s prior understanding of the substantive phenomena understudy rather than the researcher's failure to employ prescribed methodology. He has applied this lens to his analysis of these four different classes of validity, as well as to mediation analysis and to the recent replication crisis in the social sciences.