J. Scott Armstrong is an author, forecasting and marketing expert,
and a professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

.

In 2007, Armstrong made headlines by challenging Al Gore to a $10,000 bet on yearly temperatures, which he refers to as "The Global Warming Challenge". He has also testified before Congress on flaws in forecasts of polar bear populations.

Armstrong is the co-founder of the site advertisingprinciples.com, which in 2004, won the MERLOT

Merlot

Merlot is a darkly blue-coloured wine grape, that is used as both a blending grape and for varietal wines. The name Merlot is thought to derive from the Old French word for young blackbird, merlot, a diminutive of merle, the blackbird , probably from the color of the grape. Merlot-based wines...

 award for best business education site.

Education and background

Armstrong received his B.A.

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in applied science

Applied science

Applied science is the application of scientific knowledge transferred into a physical environment. Examples include testing a theoretical model through the use of formal science or solving a practical problem through the use of natural science....

 (1959) and his B.S.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in industrial engineering

Industrial engineering

Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials, analysis...

 (1960) from Lehigh University

Lehigh University

Lehigh University is a private, co-educational university located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the United States. It was established in 1865 by Asa Packer as a four-year technical school, but has grown to include studies in a wide variety of disciplines...

. In 1965, he received his M.S.

Master of Science

A Master of Science is a postgraduate academic master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in the sciences including the social sciences.-Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay:...

 in industrial administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. He received his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts....

 in 1968.

He has taught in Thailand, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Japan, and other countries.

Forecasting

• Professor 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, and a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting
  International Journal of Forecasting
  The International Journal of Forecasting is a research journal in forecasting and an official publication of the International Institute of Forecasters...
  
  , and the International Symposium on Forecasting.

• Armstrong examined the methods used by the IPCC to make projections. In an article published in Energy & Environment, he claimed that the IPCC and climate scientists have ignored the scientific literature on forecasting principles. 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. (page 1015) http://forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf

However, according to Amstrup and others' published rebuttal in the journal Interfaces:

Green and Armstrong (2007, p.997) also concluded that the thousands of refereed scientific publications that comprise the basis of the IPCC

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific intergovernmental body which provides comprehensive assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity, its potential environmental and...

 reports and represent the state of scientific knowledge on past, present and future climates "were not the outcome of scientific procedures." Such cavalier statements appear to reflect an overt attempt by the authors of those reports to cast doubt about the reality of human-caused global warming ...

• Armstrong extended a Global Warming Challenge to Al Gore
  Al Gore
  Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
  
   in June 2007, 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 future temperature change. Gore declined the wager, stating that he does not gamble. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt
  Gavin Schmidt
  Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models . He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models...
  
   described Armstrong's wager as "essentially a bet on year to year weather noise" rather than on climate change.

• Armstrong has published articles and testified before Congress on forecasts of polar bear populations, arguing that previous estimates were too flawed to justify listing the bear as an endangered species. In an evaluation of Armstrong and other authors’ criticism of polar bear population forecasts, Amstrup and other authors, writing a response in the journal Interfaces, concluded that all of the claims made by Armstrong, which included lack of independence of the USGS, were either mistaken or misleading.

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.

In 1989, a University of Maryland study ranked Professor Armstrong among the top 15 marketing professors in the U.S. based on a study using peer ratings, citations, and publications. 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.

Armstrong's works are frequently cited; his "first-author" citation rate currently averages over 200 per year.

Armstrong has received the MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources as "Best Internet Site in Business Education" for 2004.

Books

• Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles (ISBN 978-1-4039-1343-2)
• Long-Range Forecasting (ISBN 978-0-47-103002-7)
• Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners (ISBN 978-0-79-237930-0)

Forecasting

• K.C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong & A. Graefe (2007), "Methods to Elicit Forecasts from Groups: Delphi and Prediction Markets Compared", in Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting
  Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting
  Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting is a forecasting journal published quarterly by the International Institute of Forecasters...
  
  , 8, 17–20.
• 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

• J. Scott Armstrong, Terry S. Overton (1977), " Estimating Nonresponse Bias in Mail Surveys", Journal of Marketing Research 14, 396–402.
• J. Scott Armstrong (1991), "Prediction of Consumer Behavior by Experts and Novices", Journal of Consumer Research
  Journal of Consumer Research
  The Journal of Consumer Research publishes scholarly research that covers empirical, theoretical, and methodological aspects of research on consumer behavior, spanning a broad range of fields including psychology, marketing, sociology, economics, anthropology, and communications. It is published by...
  
  , 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.
• J. Scott Armstrong, Ruth A. Pagell (2003), " Reaping Benefits from Management Research: Lessons from the Forecasting Principles Project", Interfaces, 33 (6), 89–111.

External links

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.
• Hume, Brit. "Is Al Gore Willing to Put His Money Where His Mouth Is?", FOX News July 6, 2007. Accessed July 9, 2007.
• Duffy, Michael. "Chorus does not justify climate prophecies", Sydney Morning Herald, July 7, 2007. Accessed July 9, 2007.

Other media

• Dr. Scott Armstrong on Climate Forecasting – Part I – First of a three-part series.