ANALYSIS OF SJDM MEMBERS’ DEPARTMENTS

Over the next two posts, we’ll look at the membership of SJDM, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Next week, we’ll break down the membership by region, country, and state.

This week, we look at where our members come from in terms of departments. To make the plot above, we had to do a fair amount of recoding, so results are approximate.

R code is below. You can download some anonymized member information here. Save it to your R working directory to proceed.

R CODE TO REPRODUCE THIS FIGURE

WHAT WE LOOK FOR WHEN WE DECIDE

We have attended hundreds of academic conferences over the years.

We’ve seen all kinds of formats.

We’ve heard many opinions about what’s good and bad.

Here’s what we look for in an academic conference.

• Small – Fewer than 400 attendees is ideal. At large conferences, people get overwhelmed, retreat into their cliques and tend not to meet anyone new. At smaller conferences, people get to know the other attendees. After attending a small conference for a few years, you get to know a substantial proportion of the attendees. Of course, our choosing to attend small conferences only makes them bigger, but we can’t be bothered to think that many steps ahead.
• Few parallel sessions – We look for conferences that have at most 3 parallel sessions. If you sit in the back of the room at a big conference and look on, you’ll notice that people spend amazing amount of  time looking through the program trying to decide what to go to next.  Big conferences suffer from the cable TV problem: 57 channels and nothing on. With three tracks of quality content, people will spend less time choosing and will tend to choose well even if they choose arbitrarily (like following the person you were talking to at the coffee break).
• Selective – Selectivity predicts quality. Life’s too short to sit through bad talks. We find that conferences with acceptance rates under 30% tend to be better. Organizers should use poster sessions to enable people to come even if their presentations are not accepted.
• Short talks – With short talks, those who are interested in the research can always get more info later, and those who aren’t interested in the research don’t have to suffer. We like the 20-20-3 model: 20-minute talks (at maximum), 20 talks per track (at maximum), and three tracks (at maximum).
• Plenary and Presidential addresses take priority – If deciding whether to accept more talks or have more plenary / presidential addresses, go for the later. The big talks often have the big ideas, and give all the attendees a common experience to talk about during the conference. Having fewer talk slots will increase the average quality of the talks you do accept and will help keep the conference small.
• No presentations during meals – We don’t talk when others have the stage, but we understand why other people do. Conference are rare opportunities to connect with far-away friends and collaborators. It’s kind of cruel not to let people catch up during meals. Presidents deserve a separate session to get their ideas across. They should not have to compete with the clanking of forks and people talking. In banquet halls, half the audience can’t see the speaker anyway.
• Better yet, more meals on your own – Letting people choose where they eat keeps conference costs down and allows each attendee to spend according to his or her preferences. It’s also nice to see more of a city than just a convention hotel.
• Avoid social events that people can’t walk out of – H/T Eric Johnson. Attendees face a lot of constraints. Some are dead tired from international travel. Others need to juggle catching up with family and various groups of people in the city. The social event shouldn’t keep the attendees captive.
• Centrality – Keep in mind that the location of the conference matters when people decide to submit. Don’t forget the Europeans.

Those are our preferences. We’re open for suggestions!

By the way, registration is now open for the 2014 SJDM conference, which will be held November 21-24 in Long Beach. Early-registration (through Nov. 10) is $225 for members, $260for non-members, and $100 for students. Information on the conference can be found at www.sjdm.org — to register, visit www.sjdm.org/join.html.

Our favorite conference, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) Conference, is coming up soon. Our other favorite conference Behavioral Decision in Research Management (BDRM), just went down splendidly in London over the summer. We often hear people say that the SJDM and BDRM conferences are better than other psychology, decision science, consumer behavior, marketing, policy, and behavioral economics conferences. Perhaps this is due to homophily–SJDM is our favorite conference and we tend to hang out with similar others. But perhaps it is due to characteristics. We don’t have data for BDRM, but we can talk about the JDM conference. Here’s what we observe.

• JDM is small – We have put together some data on JDM attendance over the years (below). Until last year, the conference had fewer than 500 attendees. Pretty sure BDRM has always been similarly small. The Membership panel shows the number of people in the society. Attendance picked up ahead of membership in 2003.  Perhaps this has something to do with Kahneman’s Nobel Prize in 2002? Correlation is not causation. We simply remember that around 2005, every grad student in Marketing started saying that they were “doing JDM”.

Click to Enlarge

• JDM has few parallel sessions – We went from two tracks to three in 1999. I will fight to keep it that way.
• JDM is selective – JDM routinely has acceptance rates of less than 30%, despite being a rather specialized and self-selected group of researchers. It also tends to favor people who were not accepted in the previous year. And it has a limit on the number of submissions on which someone can list themselves as a presenter. This keeps people from dominating the program.
• JDM has short talks – 20 minutes is the norm.
• JDM usually has separate Presidential and Plenary talks – Dan Ariely’s talk was the first we remember in which the President didn’t have to compete with a meal.
• JDM has meals on your own – This makes JDM an incredible value for the money. Over the last 5 years, full price registration was $200 on average, and student registration was $98! (Exclamation, not factorial.)
• JDM social events tend to be those people can walk out of  – And they tend to be pretty simple. Music, dancing, drinks, done.
• JDM and location – Because JDM follows the Psychonomics Conference around, it tends to be located in major hubs that are easy to get to. The decision as to whether to break with Psychonomics comes up from time to time, but we always decide to stay. I think it’s a good move. It gives attendees the chance to attend the decision-making sessions at Psychonomics, and it saves the society the decision-making costs of figuring out where to have the conference. Yep, real decision experts consider the decision costs. Psychonomics has a policy of moving like a pendulum across the USA: East, Central, West, Central, East, …. The location does seem to affect attendance. See below and the graph at the top of this post.  We think that the high attendance in Canada was because it was easier for many Europeans to get to. The estimated changes in probabilities of attending aren’t that great, so it’s probably not too bad to keep following Psychonomics around.

TO DO YOU OWN ANALYSES IN R

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER AND 2014 CONFERENCE SUBMISSION DEADLINE

The Society For Judgment and Decision Making is pleased to announce that the current newsletter is ready for download:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

Enjoy!

Dan Goldstein
SJDM newsletter editor

P.S. Don’t forget the SJDM conference submission deadline is June 30, 2014. The conference will be held November 21-24, 2014 in Long Beach, California. The call for abstracts is available at: http://www.sjdm.org/programs/2014-cfp.html

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for the 2014 conference (oral presentations, posters, and symposia) and the Einhorn New Investigator Award. The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2014. The conference will be held November 21-24, 2014 in Long Beach, California.

The call for abstracts is available at:
http://www.sjdm.org/programs/2014-cfp.html

DISCOUNTED RATE UNTIL APRIL 28, 2014

Simona Botti, David Faro, Yuval Rottenstreich write:

Dear Friends of BDRM,

Registration for the BDRM 2014 Conference in London (17-19 July, 2014) and the Greater Good Pre-Conference is now open. Please click http://bdrm2014.org/bdrm2014-london-call-for-papers/registration to register.

It would greatly help us in terms of organisation and logistics if you are able to register early. Accordingly, discounted registration fees are available until 28 April 2014. The final registration deadline is 2 June.

We look forward to seeing you in London!

This is not an April Fool’s post!

1) 2013 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING (SJDM)

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for oral presentations, posters, and symposia* on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required. (*Please note that historically, symposium submissions have had substantially lower acceptance rates than individual paper submissions due to requirements for high integration and quality across all papers in the session. Authors who feel that a grouping of presentations is essential to communicating their research can submit a symposium with the knowledge that they are rarely accepted and that a subset of papers within the symposium might be accepted even if the whole symposium is rejected.)

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM

SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, during November 15-18, 2013. You may make reservations at $199 CAD per night (the Psychonomic convention rate). Early registration, a welcome reception, and a tribute to Duncan Luce will take place on the evening of Friday, November 15. The keynote address will be Sunday, November 17, with Susan Carey as the keynote speaker.

SUBMISSIONS

The deadline for submissions is June 17, 2013. 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 webmaster@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Robyn LeBoeuf, at robyn.leboeuf at warrington.ufl.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. You may join SJDM at http://www.sjdm.org/jdm-member.html. An individual may give only one talk and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters. Please note that both the membership rule and the one-talk/ one-poster rule will be enforced.

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 June 17, 2013. Further details are available here. Questions can be directed to the chair of the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Committee, Tim Pleskac, pleskact@msu.edu. 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
Robyn LeBoeuf (Chair), Bernd Figner, Jack Soll, Katy Milkman, Ellie Kyung, Anuj Shah, Katherine Burson, Ana Franco-Watkins, and Mare Appleby (conference coordinator)

2) 2013 CALL FOR PAPERS: WORKSHOP ON CROWDSOURCING AND ONLINE BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS (COBE)

A workshop at the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Philadelphia, June 17, 2013.

Submission Deadline: April 26, 2013

Official Web Page: http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/cobe/

OVERVIEW

The World Wide Web has resulted in new and unanticipated avenues for conducting large-scale behavioral experiments. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, oDesk, and Taskcn, among others, have given researchers access to a large participant pool that operates around the clock. As a result, behavioral researchers in academia have turned to crowdsourcing sites in large numbers. Moreover, websites like eBay, Yelp and Reddit have become places where researchers can conduct field experiments. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! conduct hundreds of randomized experiments on a daily basis. We may be rapidly reaching a point where most behavioral experiments will be done online.

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and academics to present their latest online behavioral experiments.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:
Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:

* Crowdsourcing
* Online behavioral experiments
* Online field experiments
* Online natural or quasi-experiments
* Online surveys
* Human Computation

PAPER SUBMISSION:
Submit papers electronically by visiting https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cobe2013, logging in or creating an account, and clicking New Submission at the top left.

Submissions are non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish their results subsequently in archival journals or conferences. There will be no published proceedings. Submissions should be up to 6 pages including references. Accepted papers will be presented as talks.

Deadline for submissions: April 26, 2013
Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2013

ORGANIZATION:

* Siddharth Suri, Microsoft Research
* Winter A. Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology
* Daniel G Goldstein, Microsoft Research

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

Just a reminder that the quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

IN ADDITION: The hot new workshop on Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments (COBE 2013) is now accepting submissions. For details, see:

http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/cobe/

Enjoy both!

Dan Goldstein
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

ADDING DECISION-MAKING TRAINING INTO TRADITIONAL ACADEMIC COURSES

Chris Spetzler contributes this article, recently published in PLoS ONE, which finds that putting decision-making training into a a U.S. history course raised competence in both the material of the course, as well as in decision-making.

Title:

Improved Learning in U.S. History and Decision Competence with Decision-Focused Curriculum

Citation:

Jacobson D, Parker A, Spetzler C, Bruine de Bruin W, Hollenbeck K, et al. (2012) Improved Learning in U.S. History and Decision Competence with Decision-Focused Curriculum. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45775. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045775

URL:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0045775

Abstract:

Decision making is rarely taught in high school, even though improved decision skills could benefit young people facing life-shaping decisions. While decision competence has been shown to correlate with better life outcomes, few interventions designed to improve decision skills have been evaluated with rigorous quantitative measures. A randomized study showed that integrating decision making into U.S. history instruction improved students’ history knowledge and decision-making competence, compared to traditional history instruction. Thus, integrating decision training enhanced academic performance and improved an important, general life skill associated with improved life outcomes.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/3253742644/

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

Just a reminder that the quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

Enjoy!
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

Just a reminder that the quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

Enjoy!
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor