John McCoy

John McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also affiliated with the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and Penn's MindCORE hub. His academic work bridges marketing, cognitive science, and computational modeling.

Dr. McCoy's research focuses on mathematical models of judgment and decision making, computational cognitive science, crowd wisdom, and forecasting. Methodologically, he uses a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, drawing on ideas and techniques from psychology, economics, marketing, Bayesian statistics, and computer science. Much of his current work centers on better ways to aggregate judgments from multiple individuals, including in situations where the majority may be wrong and the truth may be unverifiable.

His research has gained significant attention, with popular accounts appearing in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the New Yorker. A key contribution is the "surprisingly popular answer" method for extracting wisdom from crowds, which selects not the "most popular" answer but the "surprisingly popular" one by eliciting both answers and predictions about others' answers.

Dr. McCoy teaches graduate courses including Consumer Research Topics and Marketing Management. His teaching focuses on contemporary topics in consumer research, drawing from marketing, psychology, and economics literature to help students develop research ideas and understand theoretical and methodological approaches to consumer behavior.

His scholarly work spans multiple domains including crowd wisdom, individual-level decision making, semantic cognition, and graph theory. His research has important applications in marketing, healthcare communication, and forecasting methodologies.