BLOOD SUGAR AND HEURISTIC USE

Now this is interesting (*):

ABSTRACT:

This experiment used the attraction effect to test the hypothesis that ingestion of sugar can reduce reliance on intuitive, heuristic-based decision making. In the attraction effect, a difficult choice between two options is swayed by the presence of a seemingly irrelevant “decoy” option. We replicated this effect and the finding that the effect increases when people have depleted their mental resources performing a previous self-control task. Our hypothesis was based on the assumption that effortful processes require and consume relatively large amounts of glucose (brain fuel), and that this use of glucose is why people use heuristic strategies after exerting self-control. Before performing any tasks, some participants drank lemonade sweetened with sugar, which restores blood glucose, whereas others drank lemonade containing a sugar substitute. Only lemonade with sugar reduced the attraction effect. These results show one way in which the body (blood glucose) interacts with the mind (self-control and reliance on heuristics).

REFERENCE:

Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Toward a physiology of dual-process reasoning and judgment: Lemonade, willpower, and effortful rule-based analysis. Psychological Science, 19, 255-260.

Download it while it is hot.

(*) When Decision Science News says that “this” is interesting, it means the finding that sugar can affect the particular heuristic employed is interesting.

For a more classically cognitive model of how heuristics are selected from the adaptive toolbox, see:

• Rieskamp, Jörg & Otto, Philipp E. (2006). SSL: A Theory of How People Learn to Select Strategies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135(2), 207-236.

For a blend of the biological and the cognitive, see:

• Mata, Rui; Schooler, Lael J.; Rieskamp, Jörg (2007). The aging decision maker: Cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies. Psychology and Aging, 22(4), 796-810.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/julieivens/491354101/sizes/m/

ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

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.

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Chicago Hilton in Chicago, IL during November 15-17, 2008. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 14. Following the format established in the last few years, the schedule includes a full day on Saturday to make room for more presentations and for two keynote speakers.

SUBMISSIONS
The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2008. 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, Alan Schwartz, at www at sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, (also) Alan Schwartz, at alansz at uic.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 at http://www.sjdm.org. 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, 2008. 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. Information and an application form can be found at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/joshua.klayman/more/BeattieInfo07.htm.

Applications are due by July 16, 2008.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Alan Schwartz (Chair), George Wu, Melissa Finucane, Craig McKenzie, Yuval Rottenstreich, Michel Regenwetter, Gal Zauberman, Michael Birnbaum (SJDM president), Julie Downs (Conference Coordinator)

(*) Decision Science News believes deeply in the city of Chicago

WELL-PAID POSTDOC AT DUKE’S FUQUA SCHOOL

Many great JDMers such as Luce, Bettman, Soll, Larrick, Ariely, Payne, Clemen, Fitzsimons can be found at Duke. Now, so can a lucky postdoc.

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business invites applications for a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of Behavioral Decision Making. The postdoctoral fellow will work with Dr. John Payne, Dr. Jim Bettman and Dr. Mary Frances Luce on work related to the impact of emotion on decision making. Planned projects include experimental laboratory research addressing the interaction of different forms and sources of emotion with features of decision task environments.

Opportunities will exist to apply this research within medical and financial domains, depending in part on the interests of the applicant. Applicants should have training in experimental construction, design, and analysis as well as a high-quality, ongoing research stream. The position will provide opportunities to interact with faculty across the business school and allied departments at Duke University. No teaching is required. Salary amount is $50,000; in addition, the post doc will have access to health, dental and retirement benefits. Candidates should submit a CV and selected papers, as well as statements of teaching and research interests, and they should arrange for three letters of recommendation to be sent. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled.

Candidates are encouraged to have all materials submitted prior to July 1, 2008 to ensure full consideration. If interested, please email CV to mluce at duke.edu.

DECISION MAKING AND PLANNING UNDER LOW LEVELS OF PREDICTABILITY

The International Journal of Forecasting invites you to submit a paper for a special issue on how to make decisions and plan (or formulate strategies) when our ability to forecast is low, or in some cases nonexistent.

During the last several decades it has become increasingly clear that there are a wide range of events that we cannot predict accurately or reliably. For instance, we now know that the forecasts of experts are not usually more accurate than those of simple models, which in turn are at least as accurate as the most statistically sophisticated ones in many cases. We also know that professional investors do not seem to performbetter than making a random selection of stocks or bonds, and that past performance is not a good indication of future performance. The consequences of this for managing risk are severe. For instance, none of the consequential bank lending crises of the past decades, including the events in 1982 (Latin American lending), 1989–91 (real estate and savings and loans), 1997 (Asian contagion), and 2007 (subprime) were predicted even a couple of months in advance. These failures raise a lot of questions about the role and usefulness of forecasting. Finally, while uncertainty cannot be measured by standard methods that assume that errors are thin-tailed (normally distributed), independent of one another and constant, more sophisticated methods do not seem to produce more reliable results. This raises the question of what we can do practically to face future uncertainty realistically and rationally, and how we should manage our risks.

The editors are soliciting a broad range of papers covering all areas of social science (as well as some outside) including judgmental decision making, finance, business, government, medicine, risk management, and even earthquakes, floods and climate change; in fact, any area where our ability to forecast is limited while the resulting uncertainty is huge.

The critical question that this special issue aims to address is what we can do if we accept the serious limits of predictability in many situations and the huge uncertainty surrounding our future decisions and plans. It is therefore critical to consider and provide practical solutions for how we can live with such uncertainty without either being paralyzed by hesitation, or falling victims of the illusion of control by wrongly believing that we are able to forecast and pretending that uncertainty does not exist.

All contributions will be refereed and maintained at the usual IJF standards. Please refer to the guidelines for preparing papers for submission at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/call.pdf

The deadline for first submissions is June 2008. Please contact one of the editors for inquiries concerning the suitability of a proposed paper. Special issue editors Spyros Makridakis INSEAD, France E-mail address: Spyros.Makridakis at gmail.com. Nassim Nicholas Taleb London Business School, UK E-mail address: nnt at theblackswan.org

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fire_brace/7257910/

7TH MAX PLANCK SUMMER INSTITUTE ON BOUNDED RATIONALITY

ANNOUNCEMENT
The 7th Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Psychology and Economics will
introduce graduate students and early career researchers from different disciplines to the
study of bounded and ecological rationality. This novel approach to human decision making
examines the simple processes and cognitive mechanisms that enable good decision
making in specific environments. This perspective has seen rapid theoretical development
over the last decade with psychologists and economists taking the lead in showing how the
study of bounded rationality can provide a greater understanding of the human mind and
adaptive decision making.

Classical theories of decision making are largely based on a vision of rationality that is
unrealistic. For example, “rational” humans are often imagined to be equipped with
unlimited knowledge, time, and information-processing power. In contrast, to understand
the way that people with limited resources actually make good decisions in everyday social
and economic tasks, bounded rationality (which should not be confused with optimization
under constraints or the heuristics and biases program) starts with a more psychologically
plausible perspective: Humans are able to make good decisions by using simple heuristic
processes that are adapted to particular task environments (i.e. ecological rationality).

AIM
The main objective of the Summer Institute is to introduce students from various fields to
the study of bounded rationality. This year our specific focus will be on ecological
rationality. The first goal will be to provide an overview of the main research areas in
which ecological rationality has been studied. This will include an introduction to the
specific research methods used through participation in experiments, observations, and
simulations. As well, participants and faculty will discuss several key findings from
economics and psychology. To insure active involvement of all participants, lectures will be
balanced with small group workshops. As a second goal, the Summer Institute will also
give participants the opportunity to present their own research in a poster session, in order
to facilitate feedback, discussion and future research development.

BOARD
The interdisciplinary Summer Institute is directed by Gerd Gigerenzer (Max-Planck-
Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany). This year’s keynote speaker will be
Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. Other faculty will include members of the organizing
institute, as well as several invited international speakers from a variety of disciplines.

APPLICATION
To ensure an excellent learning environment participation in the summer school is limited
to approximately 35 talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the
world. The summer institute provides stipends to all participants to cover part of their
expenses for travel and accommodation. Precise information on the stipends will be
announced to the applicants at a later point in time. Interested students should apply by
April 7, 2008 with a brief application letter, CV, and one short letter of recommendation,
preferably sent by email.

CONTACT
For more details on the Summer Institute and the application process, please visit our
website: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/summerinstitute

JOBS IN THE UK AT DECTECH AND OXFORD

DECISION TECHNOLOGY

Decision Technology is a commercial decision research spin-out, based in central London, co-founded by Nick Chater and Henry Stott. We work internationally, mainly advising large corporations on consumer decision making. We are currently hiring several analysts, ideally with a mix of very strong academic background and ability, combined with enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced commercial environment, with potentially rapid career development.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/LS576/PhD_and_Graduate_Recruiting/

We also have one post dedicated to research on football (soccer) prediction, in collaboration with The Times newspaper.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/LS575/Football_Research_Position/

If you are interested, please contact Dr Ian Graham i.graham at dectech.org

NUFFIELD COLLEGE – UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Five-Year Research Fellowship in Experimental Social Sciences Nuffield College intends to appoint, with effect from 1st September 2008, a Research Fellow in Experimental Social Science (RFESS).

Applications are invited from post-doctoral researchers of any country wishing to undertake research in any area of experimental social sciences. The main interests of the College are in Economics, Politics and Sociology, but these are broadly construed to include, for example, social science approaches to history, social and medical statistics, international relations, social psychology, public policy, and social policy.

The College has recently begun an initiative in Experimental Social Science that includes a 20 station experimental lab that is dedicated to experimental research by scholars and students at Oxford University. It also includes a regular seminar on Experimental Social Science that highlights the research of leading experimental social scientists. The RFESS will be expected to play an active role in promoting the development of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Science. The RFESS’s main responsibility is to engage in independent scholarly research and to promote the development of experimental social science in the College. He or she will have no teaching or administrative obligations but will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of the College. This will include contributing to interdisciplinary exchanges that build on Experimental Social Science. The RFESS will be expected to organize, periodically, seminars or workshops in the area of experimental social science over the course of the five-year term of their appointment and the College can help finance and organize these activities.

• Research Fellow salary scale points 12-19: £31,625-£41,348.
• Free lunch and dinner in College (Common Table)
• Membership of the Senior Common Room

The Fellowship is intended for scholars from any country, who have completed a doctoral thesis and who are in the early years of an active research career. The Fellowship is equivalent to an Assistant Professorship in terms of academic standing, but it carries no teaching obligations. The Fellowship would normally be taken up on 1st September 2008. The appointment will be for up to 5 years.

Further particulars and an application form can be obtained from the College web
page: http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk or from the Administrative Officer, Nuffield
College, Oxford OX1 1NF. Email: justine.crump at nuffield.ox.ac.uk. Applications must be received by Friday, 4 April 2008.

POLITIMETRICS

Lionel Page (University of Westminster), in conjunction with Paul Antoine Chevalier (Paris School of Economics), Dan Goldstein (London Business School & Decision Science News), Leighton Vaughan Williams (Nottingham Trent University), and Peter Urwin (University of Westminster) are pleased to bring you Politimetrics.com a Web site that uses prediction markets to forecast election outcomes and more.

What candidate would have the highest probability to win the presidential election if nominated?

What candidate has the program which is more likely to foster growth, reduce unemployment and crime?

All these crucial questions for the voters in this 2008 US election cannot be answered using traditional polls. Using prediction markets in a innovative way, the website Politimetrics.com proposes answers to these questions.

Politimetrics.com presents the estimation of the the conditional probability of success of each candidate if nominated/elected. The numbers are estimated in real time, directly from the prices on specific Intrade contracts.

At this stage of the primary campaign, politimetrics proposes the best answer available the question: “who are the candidates the most likely to win the presidential election if nominated?” Later on in the campaign, we plan to present an even more interesting answer: “which candidate would be the most successful president on a list of issues?” To do so, we have proposed to Intrade a series of specific contracts (listed under the section “Impact of Next President” on their website). Eventually, we hope to be able to answer to questions like:

Is Hilary Clinton more likely to be more effective in managing the economy than John McCain?

Is Mitt Romney more likely to decrease crime than Barack Obama?

SYMPOSIUM ON STATISTICAL CHALLENGES IN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE RESEARCH

2008 Symposium on Statistical Challenges in eCommerce Research

Call for Papers

We invite submissions to the Fourth Symposium on Statistical Challenges in eCommerce Research (SCECR 08) to be hosted in New York City by NYU Stern’s Center for Digital Economy Research, on May 18th and 19th, 2008.

Symposium Theme: Social Networking and User-Generated Content

Our focus this year is on the statistical challenges and opportunities involving Web 2.0 applications and data. Today’s Web is increasingly interactive and networked, providing a platform for consumers to disseminate information about products, vendors, buyers and sellers, as well as about themselves and their social connections, through the use of social networking sites, blogs, wikis and interactive opinion forums. Our workshop’s theme is based on this development, since it causes the data that are available to ecommerce researchers to be increasingly user-generated, and increasingly networked.

We envision the research presented in the symposium will discuss both the opportunities and challenges relating to the statistical analysis of these new forms of ecommerce data and its use as the basis for empirical research about and facilitated by electronic commerce. As just a few examples of these opportunities and challenges:

* Characteristics of user-generated reviews and reviewers can affect ecommerce demand; feedback in reputation systems can affect sellers’ pricing policies and the nature of competition; the attributes of user-generated search queries can affect the performance of search engine advertising, and the content of customer support dialogs can affect product design. There are immense possibilities for the creative use of these data in research. There are also significant opportunities to address statistical challenges that this use raises: on the econometric identification of how the presence of this content affects outcomes that are determined simultaneously with its generation, towards developing new statistical approaches underlying the automated analysis and mining of textual content, on effectively sampling the vast repositories of such user-generated text on the web, and towards understanding the process by which this content is generated by self-interested users.

* Networked data sets have powerful explanatory and predictive power in ecommerce research.

Social-network-based word-of-mouth marketing can affect user adoption, recommendation networks can affect the structure of ecommerce demand, and usage behaviors can be influenced by local networks of friends, employees or peers. Realizing the promise of such data in ecommerce research requires advances in techniques for sampling these data, creating new identification techniques for the use of such data in econometric analysis, developing collective inference methods for more robust predictive modeling and learning, interpreting the structural properties of networks in a statistically meaningful way, and modeling the evolution of networked data sets as a stochastic process. Beyond the symposium’s theme, we also welcome and encourage submissions that raise statistical challenges in other areas of ecommerce research. Frequent topics that past workshop presentations have studied include: interpreting data from online auctions; consumer profiling using web clickstreams; search advertising; methods and models for large dynamic ecommerce data sets; representative sampling from the Internet; analyzing pricing and piracy data for digital goods, and modeling/ mining spatial ecommerce data. More generally, SCECR aims to identify problems and research questions related to empirical research in electronic commerce by bringing together researchers from computer science, economics, information systems, marketing, statistics, and other related fields. We believe this confluence will help understand better how different research perspectives are connected to one another and how, together, they can achieve the modernization and enhancement of empirical research methods.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit abstracts of their work for consideration for the symposium (the abstracts should be about 2 pages in length). These abstracts should clearly highlight the statistical challenges that the presentation of the research will raise and/or address. If available, a link to a more detailed description of the research (for instance, a working paper) can be included.

These abstracts should be e-mailed to scecr2008@stern.nyu.edu by February 15, 2008. PDF is the preferred format. This is a work-in-progress symposium, so abstracts will be evaluated based on their alignment with the symposium’s objective of furthering our understanding of statistical challenges in ecommerce research, the anticipated contribution of the research they summarize, and their potential for stimulating discussion at the symposium. Decisions on acceptance will be made by March 5, 2008.

SCECR 2008 Co-Chairs

* Anindya Ghose, aghose at stern.nyu.edu
* Foster Provost, fprovost at stern.nyu.edu
* Arun Sundararajan, asundara at stern.nyu.edu

For additional information about SCECR 08, visit the symposium website at:

http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/ceder/events.cfm?doc_id=7909

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2080084585&size=m

THE SOCIAL LEARNING STRATEGIES TOURNAMENT

Kevin Laland and Luke Rendell have received funding from the European Commission to organize a major international multi-disciplinary tournament on the evolution of social learning, inspired by Robert Axelrod’s famous Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments on the evolution of cooperation.

In recent years there has been a lot of interest (spanning several research fields, but especially economics, anthropology, and biology) in the problem of how best to acquire valuable information from others. Mathematical and computational solutions to this problem are starting to emerge, often using game-theoretical approaches. We feel the time is right for such a tournament, a sentiment shared by leading researchers in the field who are enthusiastic about this project. We have set up a committee of world-leading scientists as experts to help us design the tournament (Rob Boyd, Marc Feldman, Magnus Enquist, Kimmo Erikkson) and other leading authorities in this area of science, including Axelrod, have been advising us.

In the competition, entrants will submit behavioural strategies detailing how to respond to the problem of resource gain in a complex, variable environment in terms of combinations of individual and social learning. Where social learning is involved, entrants will be required to specify effective rules (e.g. conform, imitate the most successful individual, copy in proportion to each demonstrator’s payoff, copy when dissatisfied, etc). Entered strategies will be evaluated in two stages, with good performers in pair-wise contests going forward to an all-against-all melee. The author(s) of the strategy that performs best overall will be presented with a cash prize of 10,000 euros at the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Society meeting, in St. Andrews, U.K. in April 2009.

The competition is now running, and has a closing date of June 30 2008 and active website: http://www.intercult.su.se/cultaptation/tournament.php

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=170030408

RESEARCH SCIENTIST IN COGNITION AND DECISION MAKING AT MAX PLANCK – BERLIN

Decision Science News got its start at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition in Berlin, Germany and can attest that it is one of the sweetest, if not the sweetest, research posts on the planet. All research, no teaching, and next to zero admin. The rank is equivalent to assistant professor. The well-heeled institute pays for all travel and research costs. The support staff to faculty ratio is incredibly high. In addition, Berlin speaks English, has great nightlife, and sits between Eastern and Western Europe.

The Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, under the direction of Gerd Gigerenzer, is seeking applicants for a research scientist position equivalent to an assistant professor. The position is for 6 years (renewable every 2 years) beginning August 2008, but earlier or later start dates are possible. Salary depends on experience. Candidates must have a PhD. Except for mentoring doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, there are no teaching requirements.

Candidates should be interested in studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying bounded, social, and ecological rationality in real-world domains. Current and past researchers in our group have backgrounds in psychology, cognitive science, economics, mathematics, biology, and computer science to name but a few. The center provides excellent resources, including support staff and equipment for conducting experiments and computer simulations, generous travel support for conferences, and, most importantly, the time to think.

For more information about our group please visit our homepage at www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/abc or write researchscientist2008 (at) mpib-berlin.mpg.de. The working language of the center is English, and knowledge of German is not necessary for living in Berlin and enjoying the active life and cultural riches of this city. We strongly encourage applications from women, and members of minority groups. The Max Planck Society is committed to employing more individuals with disabilities and especially encourages them to apply.

Please submit applications (consisting of a cover letter describing research interests, curriculum vitae, up to five reprints, and 3 letters of recommendation) by January 21st 2008 to ensure consideration. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The preferred method of submission is a single PDF file for the cover letter and CV, plus PDF copies of the reprints e-mailed to researchscientist2008 (at) mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Alternatively, they can be mailed to Ms. Wiebke Moeller, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany. Letters of recommendation can be emailed or mailed.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=314832330