GET $7,500,000 TO INVESTIGATE NUDGES IN MEDICINE

People who have suffered heart attacks can improve their chances by taking aspirin and other medicines. There is a great deal of research on this, yet, we still don’t see 100% of hospitals prescribing these drugs, and the rate of prescription varies from region to region. In general, the US government has noticed “surprisingly modest behavioral response of health care providers and health care systems to information concerning treatments or procedures judged to be superior”.

How can we get the health practitioners to make decisions in line with evidence?

Techniques such as setting defaults have had profound effects in business and organ donation. Why not in medicine?

The goods new for you, decision-science-researching reader, is that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are looking to give away $15 million dollars to fund two projects on the effectiveness of nudges on health care practices. The executive summary and parts of the background section make for some interesting reading. Sorry about all the abbrevs.

Executive Summary

This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), supported by funds provided to the NIH and AHRQ under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“Recovery Act” or “ARRA”), Public Law 111-5, invites applications proposing clinical trials using the principles of behavioral economics to enhance the uptake of the results of comparative effectiveness research (CER) among health care providers in their practice. For this FOA, applicants must propose controlled trials that randomize units (whether individuals or clusters such as practices, hospitals, or larger units) to conditions, resulting in a randomized clinical trial (RCT) or cluster randomized trial (CRT). Research to foster the uptake of CER is seen to be necessary given the surprisingly modest behavioral response of health care providers and health care systems to information concerning treatments or procedures judged to be superior in CER trials. An additional possible benefit is that some behavioral economic interventions to promote the uptake of CER (e.g., those that rely on manipulating a provider’s default options) could be more cost effective than conventional approaches including some pay for performance schemes (P4P). For the purposes of this FOA, the definition of comparative effectiveness research will adhere to that adopted by the Federal Coordinating Council given at http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer/cerannualrpt.pdf. Behavioral economics refers to the interdisciplinary efforts involving cognitive and social psychologists, decision scientists, and other social scientists together with economists to model economic decision-making and consequent actions. The approach is inclusive, since at its heart it tries to take into account what is known about how people actually make decisions rather than relying on the assumption that economic agents are fundamentally rational in the sense of expected utility theory (see, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) work on Prospect Theory and Kahneman’s (2003) Nobel lecture). It is hoped that this line of research will lead to significantly greater consideration of CER by health care providers and therefore enhance the quality of the nation’s health.

From the Background section:

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) holds significant promise to improve health care quality and potentially lower costs. It appears that knowledge of which procedures and treatments are comparatively effective may not be sufficient to change critical provider practices and crucial patient behaviors. For example, although the prescription of aspirin, beta blockers, and ACE inhibitors/ARBs after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has been shown to be extremely effective in clinical trials, strongly endorsed by professional societies such as the American College of Cardiology, and used as a quality indicator by government organizations including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), rates of prescription for these drugs in hospitals following AMI show substantial regional and institutional variation and are still below 100% according to the 2008 AHRQ National Healthcare Quality Report (NHRQ). Even when comparatively effective treatments are prescribed, adherence to treatment can be disappointingly low. For example, approximately 50 percent of all AMI patients stop taking prescribed statins within two years of their event as late as the beginning of this decade (Jackevicius et al., 2002). Among asthmatics, only 32% took their preventive asthma medicine daily. Similar adherence problems exist among diabetics, resulting in poor health outcomes. Fewer than 60% of all adults age 40 and over with diagnosed diabetes have their blood sugar, cholesterol, or blood pressure under optimal control. Only 40.1% receive all three recommended services for diabetes, including an HbA1c measurement, a dilated eye examination, and a foot examination. (2008 AHRQ National Healthcare Quality Report)

It is generally presumed that both providers and patients respond to incentives and disincentives to change their behaviors, but to date, efforts to incentivize the uptake of CER have had only modest success. This funding opportunity seeks applications that will investigate whether the principles of behavioral economics could enhance the uptake of the results CER among health care providers and thus improve the health of patient populations. …

In the context of this FOA, behavioral economics refers to the interdisciplinary efforts involving cognitive and social psychologists, decision scientists, and other social scientists together with economists to model economic decision-making and consequent actions. The approach is inclusive, since at its heart it tries to take into account what is known about how people actually make decisions rather than relying on the assumption that economic agents are fundamentally rational in the sense of expected utility. As a field, behavioral economics seeks to understand how human social, cognitive, and emotional factors affect economic decisions. It considers the values assigned to all aspects of a choice, including, but not limited to monetary factors. In addition, behavioral economics acknowledges the important role that a specific context (or frame) may have on decisions, and takes into account people’s apparently irrational preferences (e.g., losses count more than gains, an object that is owned is more valuable than the same object that is not owned). For a recent review of behavioral economics from an economic perspective, Dellavigna (2009) is useful; from a psychological standpoint, Kahneman and Tversky (2000) and Kahneman (2003) provide useful data and historical context. There is growing evidence that such approaches may hold more promise than approaches based on either conventional theories of behavior change or neoclassical economics. The application of approaches from behavioral economics to the healthcare field could be valuable in the development of incentives or disincentives to motivate sustainable changes in provider and patient behavior.

It should be noted that the use of conventional economic incentives to affect provider behavior, including the uptake of CER, has been the subject of considerable research. Perhaps most germane to the topic of this FOA is the literature on “pay for performance”, also known as P4P. The logic of P4P is clear: rather than paying physicians or other health care providers (just) for the specific, billable, services they provide (which naturally incentivizes the ordering of more tests and procedures), they should be paid based on patient outcomes or on their achievement of other objective milestones that should be directly related to patient outcomes. In a classical economic context, it would be a puzzle if physicians and other treatment providers did not align their practice with the procedures or guidelines for practice that are incentivized. Strikingly, however, the evidence for the effectiveness of P4P schemes are often quite modest (reviewed by, e.g., Petersen et al., 2006). Although there are explanations in part for some of these incentive failures (e.g., the principal-agent problem), it seems clear that the incentive system could be improved. Further, many behavioral economists would argue that key improvements could be made not only in the design and delivery of incentives but also in the construction of the decision environment for the health care provider.

To date, implementation of behavioral economic approaches to change decision-making and behavior has focused primarily on economic topics such as behavioral finance (but see, e.g., Volpp et al., 2009 for a recent trial involving smoking cessation). The underlying ideas would seem to have much broader applicability. Behavioral economic interventions are generally of two basic types: one can restructure the choice environment, or manipulate the individual’s perceived incentives. One notable example of the former was Choi, Laibson, and Madrian’s (2004) intervention to increase retirement savings participation. By changing the default action to “contribute” they relied on behavioral inertia to maintain that level of participation. This is an example of altering behavior by manipulating the “choice architecture” that confronts individuals in daily life (see also Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). By structuring choice architectures to subvert individuals’ entrenched biases to stick with the status quo and discount future benefits, a well-developed system of so-called asymmetric paternalism (Loewenstein, Brennan, and Volpp, 2007) could provide interesting opportunities to induce change in provider behavior with respect to selecting a comparatively effective treatment while preserving a clinician’s freedom to choose an alternative treatment when the CER-recommended treatment is counter-indicated. One relevant example of the use of a default option approach that has been successfully implemented (albeit not in the context of CER per se) can be seen in places where statute or policy allows generic equivalents to be substituted for brand name drugs by pharmacists unless a physician specifically notes (or checks off a box denoting that) the prescription is to be “dispensed as written” (DAW). Here, the “transaction cost” of over-riding the default is almost zero, but the effect on generic dispensing rates can be quite large. In particular, generic drug utilization rates varied from 37 percent to 83 percent among Medicare Part D plans (Levinson, 2007), and it would appear that some of this variation is attributable to systemic factors that could be manipulated.

In addition to these more passive, environmental manipulations, behavioral economists have explored the manipulation of incentives to alter behavior. There has been particular interest in the use of deposit contracts, lotteries, and other monetary contingencies to effect health-related behavior change (e.g., Volpp et al. 2008). (Also note that some self-imposed commitment devices can be at least modestly effective at nearly zero external cost, e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002). The effect of these devices is generally to allow individuals to overcome their own behavioral inertia, or to make continued compliance with recommended courses of action more attractive. Some of these techniques are similar in spirit to P4P, but the design of the incentives can be very different, and reflects what is known by psychologists about people’s preferences, and how those preferences can be manipulated. Like P4P, however, there can be concerns about the efficiency of providing incentives to reward behavior that would occur in any event, and questions concerning the overall cost effectiveness of monetary incentives. Trials supported by this funding opportunity will, of course, have the option to directly compare rates of uptake in incentivized and non-incentivized conditions, potentially leading to estimates of the marginal cost of the incentive.

More information at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-OD-10-001.html

And please, if you get $7,500,000, please consider yourself nudged to donating 10% to Decision Science News.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirbhao/2573135240/

FIRST ANNUAL BOULDER SUMMER CONFERENCE ON CONSUMERS’ FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING

What: First Annual Boulder Summer Conference on Consumers’ Financial Decision Making
When: June 27-29, 2010
Where: Hotel Boulderado, Boulder, Colorado
Deadline: Abstract SubmissionDecember 15, 2009

Decision Science News was at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder last week, had a great time, and thinks they have a great group there with strong expertise and interest in Judgment and Decision Making research, particularly as it concerns consumers’ financial decision making. Fittingly, they are about the launch the first in a set of annual conferences on the topic. Decision Science News intends to be in attendance. Here’s the information, provided by John Lynch:

Submitting Abstracts

To submit an extended abstract (1 to 2 pages), please visit the conference website: http://Leeds.Colorado.Edu/BoulderSummerConference and click on the Paper Abstract Submission link.

Submission Deadline for Extended Abstract: December 15, 2009

Conference Overview

The conference will provide a forum for exchange of ideas among researchers in different fields working on problems of consumer financial decision-making. Consumer welfare is strongly affected by household financial decisions large and small: choosing mortgages; saving to fund 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. Basic research in judgment and decision making, psychology, consumer research, behavioral finance, and behavioral economics can inform our understanding of how consumers actually make such decisions and how consumers can be helped to make better decisions by innovations in public policy, business, and consumer education.

Conference Format

Papers will be presented in two forums: a poster session the first night of the conference and in a series of 75-minute sessions. Ten such sessions over the two days of the conference will each have two paper presenters, a discussant, and time for audience questions and comments.

The conference co-chairs will select papers for presentation at the conference based on extended abstracts. Selected papers must not be published prior to the conference, but those researchers presenting their work at the conference must have a paper that is complete and available for review by discussants one month prior to the conference. Selections will be based on quality, relevance to consumers’ financial decision-making, and contribution to breadth of topics and disciplinary approaches across the conference as a whole.

Registering for the Conference and Booking a Room

There are links on the conference website for booking at the Boulderado and for registering for the conference.

The conference will be held in the historic Hotel Bouderado. We have negotiated very attractive room rates for conference attendees (and families). Please note that the Conference has not guaranteed any rooms, rather they are on a “first come” basis. We encourage you to book your rooms as soon as you can. Boulder is a popular summer destination and rooms go quickly at the Hotel Boulderado!

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flatirons_Winter_Sunrise_edit_2.jpg

A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF EXPERIMENTS NOW POSSIBLE

Gabriele Paolacci sends along the following announcement. Decision Science News is also a fan of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (or mturk as we insiders call it), and it and its colleagues at Yahoo! Research are actively using with the evolving methodology.

You are probably aware of the growing interest for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) as a tool for conducting experimental research in the web. By allowing to allocate tasks to paid subjects, Mechanical turk is an online labor market where subjects can be recruited and paid on a large scale and in short time. Being an online labor market, it also is a potentially interesting “ecologically valid” context for experiments: subjects are looking for “real” jobs when they decide to participate to an experiment.

While the potential for using AMT in experiments is huge, there are obvious issues of validating its reliability. In this spirit, hoping to provide a service to the experimental community, Massimo Warglien and me started a blog. In this blog we are sharing our first attempts to replicate classical lab experiments in AMT and compare the outcomes with the original ones. As replications cumulate, we hope to be able to provide in the future more sophisticated meta-analyses of the results.

Please give a look at the blog if you are curious: http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com/

We invite you to share this information with anyone that might be interested. In particular, we invite to send us other replication exercises that might be performed to enrich the data set of replications and broaden the empirical basis of the validation effort. Other kind of experimental or survey experiences or useful tools to improve experimentation in the web via crowd-sourcing resources such as AMT are welcome as well; useful links are also gratefully received.

Among other things, AMT might provide a great tool for having students implement simple and cheap experimental projects during courses on experimental methods and results. Replication studies could be great projects for students and could help to quickly implement a large data set of comparative nature with other experimental settings such as the traditional lab.

Hope you like the blog. If anyone is interested, I will be available to talk more about this at the SJDM conference.

If you want to learn about the original mechanical turk, then it’s Wikipedia to the rescue.

2009 MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

Just a reminder that the annual Society For Judgment and Decision Making Conference, the conference most in line with the interests of the readers of this blog, is just around the corner.

When: November 21-23, 2009. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20.

Where: Sheraton Boston Hotel in Boston, MA. Hotel reservations at the $175 Psychonomic convention rate can be made by clicking here.

Details:

Program (updated 11/6)

Poster abstracts (updated 11/6)

Registration form

Map:

Decision Science News will be there, as always, covering both the judgment and decision-making action.

DEPARTMENT OF OPERATIONS AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PROFESSORSHIP

Department of Operations and Information Management
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

The Operations and Information Management Department at the Wharton School is home to faculty with a diverse set of interests in decision-making, information technology, information-based strategy, operations management, and operations research. We are seeking applicants for a full-time, tenure-track faculty position. Applicants must have a Ph.D. (expected completion by June 30, 2011 is acceptable) from an accredited institution and have an outstanding research record or potential in the OPIM Department’s areas of research. Candidates with interests in multiple fields are encouraged to apply. The appointment is expected to begin July 1, 2010 and the rank is open.

More information about the Department is available at: http://opimweb.wharton.upenn.edu/

Interested individuals should complete and submit an online application via our secure website, and must include:
• A cover letter (indicating the areas for which you wish to be considered)
• Curriculum vitae
• Names of three recommenders, including email addresses [junior-level candidates]
• Sample publications and abstracts

To apply please visit our web site:
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/home/recruiting.html

Further materials, including (additional) papers and letters of recommendation, will be requested as needed. The department will begin reviewing applications on December 1, 2009. To ensure full consideration, materials should be received by December 1st, but applications will continue to be reviewed until appointments are made.

Contact:
Professor Eric K. Clemons
Operations and Information Management Department
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
3730 Walnut Street
500 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340

The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Women, minority candidates, veterans and individuals with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.

SJDM NEWSLETTER / CONFERENCES / SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY NETWORK

Some assorted news this week.

1) The current Society for Judgment and Decision Making Newsletter is ready for download at http://www.sjdm.org/newsletters/09-sep.pdf

_______________________________________

2) The SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Boston, MA during November 21-23, 2009. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20. Hotel reservations at the $175 Psychonomic convention rate can be made by clicking here.

Program

Poster abstracts

Registration form (discount for registration by 11/6, or, putting it another way, surcharge for registration after 11/6)

_______________________________________

3) One item that didn’t make the newsletter is the following conference, which is interesting as it is the largest of its kind in India to date:

The 3rd International Conference on Global Interdependence and Decision Sciences will be held in Hyderabad, India, from Dec 28 to Dec 30, 2009. It is one of the biggest decision sciences events of the world, and is being organized by IIT Mumbai, ASCI and the Decision Sciences Institute. The website for the event is http://www.icgids2009.in

_______________________________________

4) Over the past few months, the Social Psychology Network has introduced several new resources related to decision making. We list some of the new features here:

CAN YOU AVOID SEGREGATION?
http://www.UnderstandingPrejudice.org/segregation

Building on the work of Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, this new interactive learning resource shows that small social preferences at the individual level can generate surprising patterns of segregation at the group level, and it shows how the same dynamic can be used to reverse segregation. In addition, the site offers more than 100 web links and readings for visitors interested in learning more about segregation.

DATA VISUALIZATION TOOLS AND VIDEOS

http://www.socialpsychology.org/methods.htm#visualization

These new resources include links to web videos that dramatically illustrate how “data animation” is being used to address global problems such as poverty, climate change, and the spread of HIV. Inspiring, informative, and highly recommended for teachers, students, and anyone who analyzes statistical data.

PSYCHOLOGY HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD

SPN now offers its free news service through a variety of channels:

RSS (over 11,000 subscribers)
http://www.socialpsychology.org/headlines.rss

PsychWidget (over 16,000 downloads)
http://www.PsychWidget.org/

Twitter (over 1,700 users)
Tweets by PsychNews

iGoogle (over 3,800 users)
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.socialpsychology.org/headlines.rss

Headlines Box (for your home page, course syllabus, or blog)
http://www.socialpsychology.org/headlines.htm
AN INVITATION TO EDUCATORS
http://www.ActionTeaching.org/

Do you teach about peace or social justice in a way that creates a more peaceful and just society? Do you teach about health psychology in a way that improves the health of your campus or local community? Does your teaching of decision science help students become less biased or prejudicial?

If you practice action teaching of any kind, you’re invited to apply for the SPN Action Teaching Award (Deadline: January 15, 2010). The $1,000 prize honors classroom activities, student assignments, field experiences, and web demonstrations that promote a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. (Note: Entries are most competitive when they include an assessment of learning outcomes and/or student reactions.)

2009 MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Boston, MA during November 21-23, 2009. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20. Hotel reservations at the $175 Psychonomic convention rate can be made by clicking here.Conference fees are yet to be determined. Last year’s fees were $330 for members ($170 for students). Fees this year are anticipated to be the same or (possibly) lower.

2009 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for symposia, oral presentations, and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required.

SUBMISSIONS: The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2009. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster, Jon Baron, at www@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Craig McKenzie, at cmckenzie@ucsd.edu.

ELIGIBILITY: At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. A membership form may be downloaded from the SJDM website athttp://www.sjdm.org/jdm-member.html. An individual may give only one talk (podium presentation) and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters.

AWARDS

The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM.

The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due July 1, 2009. Further details are available at http://www.sjdm.org.

The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM meeting. Further details will be available at http://www.sjdm.org.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Craig McKenzie (Chair), Alan Schwartz, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Melissa Finucane, Nathan Novemsky, Michel Regenwetter, Ulf Reips, Gal Zauberman, Dan Ariely (SJDM president), Julie Downs (Conference Coordinator).

AN INTRO TO SMDM

This week, Alan Schwartz and Valerie Reyna provide a bit of information to Decision Science News readers, and people familiar with the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) about the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).

As a result of strengthening ties between the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Medical Decision Making, SJDM members with interests in decisions around health and health care are encouraged to attend (and submit presentations for) the SMDM annual meeting (for 2009, it’ll be at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Hollywood, CA, USA, October 18-21). This “travel guide” highlights some of the differences between the meetings that you should expect.

About SMDM and its meeting
The Society for Medical Decision Making’s mission is to better understand medical decision making, and to improve health outcomes through the advancement of proactive systematic approaches to clinical decision making and policy-formation in health care by providing a scholarly forum that connects and educates researchers, providers, policy-makers, and the public. Its members include physicians, economists, psychologists, decision analysts, and other decision researchers. Its annual meeting is one year older than SJDM. The two societies had about 50 members in common in 2008.

Meeting format – what’s similar?
Like the SJDM meeting, SMDM features poster sessions, concurrent oral presentation sessions with question and answer time, and symposia. There is a presidential address, a keynote address, an awards presentation, and a social event.

Meeting format – what’s different?
Both SMDM and its meeting are somewhat larger than SMDM. A typical SMDM meeting sees about 560 attendees to SJDM’s 490.

SMDM oral presentations are 15 minutes long (including questions), rather than SJDM’s 20 minutes. Presentation sessions are usually chaired by a society member who is not speaking in the session, and is
responsible for timekeeping.

The SMDM symposium differs from the SJDM symposium. In SMDM, a symposium is usually held as the only session in its time slot, and is organized by the symposium chairs for the meeting. Most often, the chairs seek external funding (e.g., from one of the National Institutes of Health) to support a panel of presenters around a focused theme. In this, they resemble panel-based keynotes.

SMDM also offers (at extra cost) an extensive set of half-day and full-day short courses during the day before the meeting. These courses feature instruction by experts in a variety of methodological and content areas and vary in the level of background required; it is common for senior SMDM members to take short courses as students. Although the catalog of short courses for 2009 is already fixed, SJDM members might enjoy developing and teaching a short course at a future meeting; if that interests you, it’s wise to take a course this year to get familiar with the format.

Cultural notes
Like SJDM, SMDM is considered a very friendly meeting, and encourages presentations by students and trainees as well as more senior researchers. The keen observer of scientific cultures will, however, find several intriguing differences between SJDM and SMDM which reflect the different traditions of social science and medical meetings:

SMDM presidential addresses traditionally tackle broad themes about the Society and its role in health care scholarship, policy, and education, unlike the traditionally data-heavy research talks based on the work of the president at SJDM.

SMDM has a higher registration fee ($410 for members and $560 for non-members in 2008) meeting elements are often supported by external funding. The hotels are often more expensive, concurrent oral sessions provide microphones for the audience, and laptops are provided by the hotel for presenters.
When asking a question of a presenter at SMDM, it is customary to go to the microphone, state your name and institution, and, if possible, offer some brief encouraging words about the value of the research before asking the question. You may also hear people begin their question with “I’m confused”, in tribute to founding (and still highly active) SMDM member Steve Pauker, for whom this has become a trademark phrase. The dress code at SMDM is, on average, slightly less casual. The SMDM social event often involves renting out a museum, aquarium, or other artistic or scientifically-oriented institution, and providing a catered reception with opportunities for discussion that conclude considerably earlier than SJDM’s typical post-midnight last round. (There have been notable exceptions, however, such as the 1997 Houston meeting’s rodeo event complete with barbeque and a cow-chip throwing contest). In 2009, to avoid Los Angeles traffic, the social event will take over the upscale bowling alley next door to the hotel.

Key phrases you may hear at the SMDM meeting

Time-tradeoff and standard gamble: Two common methods for assessing the health-related utility for a person in a given state of health. In time-tradeoff, respondents identify the indifference point between living their full life expectancy in an impaired health state and living a shorter life in perfect health. In standard gamble, respondents identify the indifference point between an impaired health state for sure and a gamble with some probability of perfect health, otherwise death.

Quality-adjusted life year (QALY): A common metric for evaluating the impacts of changing health states on health-related utility over a life time. One QALY is one year of life spent in perfect health (or two years spent in a health state assessed as having utility 0.5, etc.)

Cost-effectiveness analysis: A decision analysis which seeks to minimize the ratio between the cost of a strategy (e.g., a treatment program for a disease) and its health benefit (“effectiveness”), typically measured in $/QALY or €/QALY. Conventionally, interventions with ratios lower than $50,000-$100,000/QALY are deemed “cost-effective”.

The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS): A developing international set of criteria to determine the quality of patient decision aids, tools that attempt to improve decision quality by helping patients understand complex information and clarify their own preferences.

For more information about SMDM, including its call for papers, visit http://www.smdm.org

In 2009, there is also a special opportunity for three SJDM members to have travel supported to present their work in collaboration with SMDM members. This has a deadline of May 30, 2009; see http://decision.cybermango.org

SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITY UTILITY AND DECISION MAKING CONFERENCE 2009

Decision Science News will attend the Subjective Probability Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM22) conference, which will be held in Rovereto (Italy) from Sunday, the 23rd till Thursday, the 27th of August 2009.

The deadline for the online submission of abstracts for papers/posters/symposia is April 10, 2009. Visit the conference web site at: http://discof.unitn.it/spudm22/

• Eric Johnson, Columbia University, New York, USA
• Alan Sanfey, University of Arizona, Arizona, USA
• Tilmann Betsch, Erfurt University, Germany

The conference will also include a panel discussion on “Automatic and controlled judgment and decision-making” chaired by Cornelia Betstch (Erfurt University, Erfurt, Germany) featuring the invited speakers as well as Ellen Peters (Decision Research, Eugene, USA) and Andreas Gloeckner (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany) as invited panelists.

See you in Rovereto!

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH CONFERENCE, PITTSBURGH, PA, OCT 22-25 2009

Decision Science News will return to the city of its birth for this year’s Association for Consumer Research (ACR) conference. Will you?

What:The Association for Consumer Research Annual North American Conference
When: October 22 – 25, 2009
Where: Westin Convention Center Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Submission Deadline: Monday, March 23, 2009 by 5:00 pm (EST)
Call for papers: http://acrwebsite.org/ACR_Call_09_Final_01_15.pdf
Co-chairs: Margaret C. Campbell, University of Colorado; Jeff Inman, University of Pittsburgh; Rik Pieters, Tilburg University

Conference Announcement and Call for Submissions 
(original here) 

The 2009 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research will be held at the Westin Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA from Thursday, October 22 through Sunday, October 25, 2009.

The theme of ACR 2009 is “A World of Knowledge At the Point of Confluence.” Consumer researchers from around the world will meet in the City at the Point, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers flow together to form the Ohio River. International consumer researchers will gather in Pittsburgh to share the ideas and data that converge to create knowledge.

The conference format will follow that of past years. A pre-conference Doctoral Symposium will be held Thursday (co-chaired by Stacy Wood and Dave Wooten). Thursday evening will feature an opening reception for ACR 2009. The conference program on Friday and Saturday will include Competitive Paper sessions, Special sessions, Roundtable discussions, Working Paper sessions, and the Film Festival. A Gala Reception will be held Saturday evening at the Senator Heinz History Center, just two blocks from the Westin.

ACR 2009 will provide a confluence of consumer researchers for scholarly presentations, discussions, networking and collaborations.

Format and Program Structure

The conference will open with a reception on Thursday evening (after the Doctoral Symposium). Sessions will be held on Friday and Saturday.

There are five types of submission for ACR 2009.

1) Competitive Papers represent the completed original work of their authors. The ACR conference co-chairs assign papers to sessions that reflect similar scholarly interests.

2) Special Sessions provide opportunities for focused attention on emerging areas of research. Successful sessions drill deeply into a specific issue using similar theoretical or methodological bases, or they promote a confluence of paradigms, methodologies, or research orientations.

3) Films at the Film Festival sessions provide video insight into consumer topics.

4) Working Papers present preliminary findings from the early stages of a research project. Authors distribute their papers, display posters of their research, and are available to discuss and answer questions during the assigned Working Paper session.

5) Roundtables encourage intensive participant discussion of emerging consumer research topics.

Submission and Decision Deadlines

All submissions (for competitive papers, special sessions, working papers, roundtables, and films) must be received by Monday, March 23, 2009 by 5:00 pm Pittsburgh time (EST). In order to maintain accessibility, please note that each ACR participant may present only twice in Special and/or Competitive paper sessions during the conference. When uploading a submission, authors will need to specify the paper presenter.

Notification of acceptance will be made by Friday, July 24, 2009. Final acceptances will be conditional upon receipt of revised documents and copyright release.

General Submission Requirements and Procedures

All submission activity (submissions, reviews and notifications) for ACR 2009 will be electronic, through the conference website at http://www.acrweb.org/acr/.

When you first enter the conference website you will need to sign up:

– Click on the “Sign up” tab at the top right of the page.

– Provide your information (name, email address, etc.) (Note: this does NOT register you for the conference; details for conference registration will be sent out in July 2009).

– To submit the information, click on the “Log in” button and then choose “Submitting Author” as your role. You will need your email ID and the password that you created for your user profile.

– Click on the “Submit paper/proposal” button.

All submissions to the 2009 ACR Conference website require the following information:

• Submission Type: Competitive Paper, Special Session, Roundtable, Working Paper, Film Festival

• Title of Submission

• Primary Contact Information: name, affiliation, mailing address, phone number and email address for the author who is the primary contact

• Content Area Codes and Methodological Area Codes (These are critical for assigning reviewers – please pick codes that provide the best match to your work).

• Word 2003 or Rich Text Format file to upload (Don’t use Word 2007)

• Names of Other Co-authors/Participants and their affiliations, and whether they are presenting author(s)

Note: All authors need to ensure that their names appear in the same way in all submissions. This is because the database will consider J. Jeffrey Inman, John Jeffrey Inman, and Jeff Inman as three different authors.

Time limit. Please note that the website will time you out after 60 minutes. Therefore, in order to avoid losing information, it is best to copy and paste your information into submission fields rather than composing it online.

Acknowledgement of receipt. The primary contact person will automatically receive an email acknowledgement of receipt of the submission. If you do not receive an acknowledgement, please check your spam folder. If you do not receive an acknowledgement within 48 hours after submission, please send an email inquiry about the status of your submission to: ACR2009@katz.pitt.edu