ONE POST, TWO JOBS

The YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT is seeking additional faculty members at all levels in the areas of economics and organizational behavior. Ph.D. or equivalent is required; research and teaching interest in theory and application preferred, as well as an interdisciplinary orientation. Appointments will be made for the 2011 – 2012 academic year.

To apply online click here.

Please note that only electronic applications are accepted this year.

The deadlines for receipt of all materials is October 15, 2010.

For more information visit: http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/faculty_openings.shtml

Yale is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and especially encourages applications from women and members of minority groups.

————

THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND DECISION SCIENCES AT CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY seeks candidates to fill a junior tenure-track position in decision making and public policy.

Candidates should have a strong commitment both to applying decision-making research to public policy and to creating the scientific foundations for such applications. Their letter of application should describe a research program designed to influence public policy and contribute to basic knowledge. Although policy interests could be in any area, the department has strengths in environment, energy, health, safety, finance, national security, and risk. Teaching would support the department’s educational programs.

The department is interdisciplinary, with faculty members from psychology, economics, political science, decision science, and history. Several have joint appointments in other departments, notably Engineering and Public Policy. Collaboration is a hallmark of the Department and University.

For more information, please visit: http://www.hss.cmu.edu/departments/sds/

Applicants should send a CV, two papers, three letters of recommendation, and a statement of research interests to:

Chair, Behavioral Decision Research and Policy Search Committee
Carnegie Mellon University
Department of Social and Decision Sciences
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890.

Please submit applications by December 1.

Carnegie Mellon University is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity employer. We encourage minorities, women, and individuals with disabilities to apply.

CMU Baker & Porter Halls photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aschultz/3254899110/

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH CONFERENCE, OCT 7-10, 2010

What: The Association for Consumer Research Annual North American Conference [Website]
Where: Jacksonville, FL
Hotel: The Hyatt Regency [Map] [Booking]
When: OCT 7-10, 2010
Registration: Available now online
Early-bird deadline: Sept 1. Second price hike at Sept 25th.

ACR 2010 Jacksonville is open for registration!

Decision Science News notices that this year, the conference uses “green defaults”. Innovative! Check it out:

• You will have the option to opt out of the complete program given at the conference. You can build your own program on the ACR website by going to www.acrweb.org/acr and signing in. Once there, choose the “program” option, and you will see the new tool which you can utilize. Print your customized program and bring it with you!
• The default meal is vegetarian. You will have the option to opt out of the vegetarian meal.

Build-your-own-program is neat. We usually look at about half of the program, and end up needing about 20% of it at the conference. They have some other nudges as well:

• You will have the option of buying carbon offsets for your flight.
• You can choose the electronic version of the proceedings instead of a hardcover copy and receive a $20 discount.

The discount for the e-proceedings seems like a classic incentive. Decision Science News just registered and found that they used no default (forced choice) for this question. They could have made the default the green one and said “hardcover available for an extra $20”. In any case, we are glad to see research put to use.

SPECIAL ISSUE: RECOGNITION PROCESSES IN INFERENTIAL DECISION MAKING

The journal Judgment and Decision Making today published a special issue on “Recognition processes in inferential decision making” edited by Julian N. Marewski, Rüdiger F. Pohl and Oliver Vitouch. The special issue turns out to be the first of two special issues, something the editors had not anticipated:

What was originally planned as one issue consisting of about 6 contributions turned into two volumes with about 20 submitted articles, some of which are still under review. All submissions were and are subject to Judgment and Decision Making’s peer review process, under the direction of the journal’s editor, Jonathan Baron, and us.

Here is how the editors describe the contents of the two special issues:

Let us briefly provide an overview of the contents of the two issues. The first issue presents 8 articles with a range of new mathematical analyses and theoretical developments on questions such as when the recognition heuristic will help people to make accurate inferences; as well as experimental and methodological work that tackles descriptive questions; for example, whether the recognition heuristic is a good model of consumer choice.

The forthcoming second issue strives to give an overview of the past, current, and likely future debates on the recognition heuristic, featuring comments on the debates by some of those authors who have been heavily involved, early experiments on the recognition heuristic that were run decades ago, but thus far never published, as well as new experimental tests of the recognition heuristic and alternative approaches. Finally, in the second issue, we will also provide a discussion of all papers in the two issues, and speculate about what we should possibly learn from these papers.

In allocating accepted articles to the two issues, we strove to strike a balance between the order of submission, the order of acceptance, and the topical fit of the papers. We apologize to those authors who feel disfavored by our attempts to establish such a balance; either because they preferred to see their contributions appear in the first, or alternatively, in the second issue.

Also surprising to Decision Science News was that although the topic was recognition processes in inference, all the articles address one particular rule of thumb, Goldstein & Gigerenzer’s recognition heuristic.

Goldstein, D. G. & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90. [Download]

In other RH news, editor Marewski et al has a 2010 paper on the heuristic and editor Pohl also has a 2010 recognition heuristic paper.

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST SPECIAL ISSUE

Recognition-based judgments and decisions: Introduction to the special issue (Vol. 1), pp. 207-215 (html). Julian N. Marewski, Rüdiger F. Pohl and Oliver Vitouch

Why recognition is rational: Optimality results on single-variable decision rules, pp. 216-229 (html). Clintin P. Davis-Stober, Jason Dana and David V. Budescu

When less is more in the recognition heuristic, pp. 230-243 (html). Michael Smithson

The less-is-more effect: Predictions and tests, pp. 244-257 (html). Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos

Less-is-more effects without the recognition heuristic, pp. 258-271 (html). C. Philip Beaman, Philip T. Smith, Caren A. Frosch and Rachel McCloy

Precise models deserve precise measures: A methodological dissection, pp. 272-284 (html). Benjamin E. Hilbig

Physiological arousal in processing recognition information: Ignoring or integrating cognitive cues?, pp. 285-299 (html). Guy Hochman, Shahar Ayal and Andreas Glöckner

Think or blink — is the recognition heuristic an intuitive strategy?, pp. 300-309 (html). Benjamin E. Hilbig, Sabine G. Scholl and Rüdiger F. Pohl

I like what I know: Is recognition a non-compensatory determiner of consumer choice?, pp. 310-325 (html). Onvara Oeusoonthornwattana and David R. Shanks

Photo adapted from S. M. Daselaar, M. S. Fleck, and R. Cabeza. (2006) Triple Dissociation in the Medial Temporal Lobes: Recollection, Familiarity, and Novelty. Journal of Neurophysiology 96, 1902-1911.

31st ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 2010

SJDM’s 31st annual conference will be held in the Drury Plaza Hotel, St. Louis, Missouri, during November 19-22, 2010. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 19.

Hotel reservations at the $125/night Psychonomic convention rate can be made by clicking here.

JDMers can also stay at the Millenium Hotel at the conference rate of $134/night by clicking here, or $107/night for students here.

SUBMISSIONS
The deadline for submissions is June 21, 2010. Current call for abstracts is here. 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, Michel Regenwetter, at regenwet@uiuc.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/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, 2010. 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
Michel Regenwetter (Chair), Craig McKenzie, Nathan Novemsky, Bernd Figner, Gretchen Chapman, Gal Zauberman, Ulf Reips, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Ellie Kyung

THE ABILITY OF WINNERS TO WIN AGAIN

Even people who aren’t avid baseball fans (your DSN editor included) can get something out of this one.

When two baseball teams play each other on two consecutive days, what is the probability that the winner of the first game will be the winner of the second game?

[If you like fun, write down your prediction.]

DSN’s father-in-law told him that recently the Mets beat the Phillies 9 to 1, but the very next day, the Phillies beat the Mets 10 to 0. How could this be? If the Mets were so good as to win by 8 points, how could the exact same players be so bad as to lose by 10 points to the same opponents 24 hours later?

Let’s call this situation (in which team A beats team B one one day, but team B beats team A the very next day) a “reversal”, and we’ll say the size of the reversal is the smaller of the two margins of victory. In the above example, the size of the reversal was 8.

Using R (code provided below), DSN obtained statistics on all major league baseball games played between 1970 and 2009 and calculated how often each type of reversal occurs per 100,000 pairs of consecutive games. The result is in the the graph above. Big reversals are rare. A reversal of size 8 occurs in only 174 of 100,000 games; a size 12 reversal happens but 10 times per 100k. A size 13 reversal never happened in those 40 years. One might think this is because it would be uncommon for a team that is so good to suddenly become so bad and vice versa, but note that big margins of victory are rare: only 4% of games have margins of victory of 8 points or larger.

Back to our question:

If a team wins on one day, what’s the probability they’ll win against the same opponent when they play the very next day?

We asked two colleagues knowledgeable in baseball and the mathematics of forecasting. The answers came in between 65% and 70%.

The true answer: 51.3%, a little better than a coin toss.

That’s right. When you win in baseball, there’s only a 51% chance you’ll win again in more or less identical circumstances. The careful reader might notice that the answer is visible in the already mentioned chart. The reversals of size 0, (meaning no reversal, meaning the same team won twice) occur 51,296 times per 100,000 pairs of consecutive games.

[At this point, DSN must admit that it is entirely possible that it has made a computational error. It welcomes others to reproduce the analysis with the code or pre-processed data at the end of this post.]

What of the adage “the best predictor of future performance is past performance”? It seems less true than Sting’s observation “History will teach us nothing“. Let’s continue the investigation.

Here were plot the probability of winning the second game based on obtaining various margins of victory in the first game. We simply calculated the average win rate for each margin of victory up to 11 games, which makes up 98% of the data, and bin together the remaining 2%, comprising margins of victory from 12 to 27 points. (Rest assured, the binning makes the graph look prettier, but does not affect the outcome.)

The equation of the robust regression line is: Probability(Win_Second_Game) = .498 + .004*First_Game_Margin which suggests that even if you win the first game by an obscene 20 points, your chance of winning the second game is only 57.8%

Still in disbelief? Here we do no binning and plot the margin of victory (or loss) of the first game winner as a function of its margin of victory in the first game. The clear heteroskedasticity is dealt with by iterative reweighted least squares in R’s rlm command. Similar results are obtained by fitting a loess line. This model is Expected_Second_Game_Margin = -.012 + .030*First_Game_Margin

One final note. The 51.3% chance you’ll win the second game given you’ve won the first is smaller than the so called “home team advantage”, which we found to be a win probability of 54.2% on first games and 53.8% on second games.

When the home team wins the first game, it wins the second game 54.7% of the time.
When the home team loses the first game, it wins the second game 52.8% of the time.
When the visitor wins the first game, it wins the second game 47.2% of the time.
When the visitor loses the first game, it wins the second game 45.3% of the time.

Surprisingly, when it comes to winning the second game, it’s better to be the home team who just lost than the visitor who just won. So much for drawing conclusions from winning. Decision Science News has always wondered why teams are so eager to fire their coaches after they lose a few big games. Don’t they realize that their desired state of having won those same few big games would have been mostly due to luck?

There you have it. Either we have made an egregious error in calculation or recent victories are surprisingly uninformative.

Do your own analysis alternative 1: The pre-processed data
If you wish, you can cheat and get the pre-processed data at http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/bball/reversals.zip

This may be of interest for people who don’t use R or for impatient types who just want to cut to the chase.

No guarantee that our pre-processing is correct. It should be all pairs of consecutive games between the same two teams.

Do your own analysis alternative 2: The code

I’ll provide the column names file for your convenience at http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/bball/cnames.txt. I left out a bunch of columns names I didn’t care about. The complete list is at: http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/bball/glfields.txt

R CODE
(Don’t know R yet? Learn by watching: R Video Tutorial 1, R Video Tutorial 2)

#Home team advantage second game given home lost first game
#Equals 1 - Visitor p win second game given visitor won first game
with(relmerge[relmerge$dx < 0,],mean(dy > 0))


EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMA INTERVIEWS (2010 edition)

PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics are now gearing up to get their “packets” ready to mail out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
I’ve seen the Marketing job market turn happy grad students into quivering masses of fear. I want to share experiences that I and others have contributed, and provide a bit advice to make the whole process less mysterious.

WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO ME?
I’ve been on the AMA job market twice (mid 2000s), the Psychology market once (late 90s). As a professor I’ve conducted 20 AMA interviews and been a part of dozens of hiring decisions. I’ve been on the candidate end of about 40 AMA interviews, and experienced numerous campus visits, face-to-face interviews, offers, and rejections. I’m an outsider to Marketing who went on the market older and with more experience than the average rookie (35 years of age, with 8 years of research scientist, postdoc, visiting scholar, and industry positions). I’ve hired many people for many academic posts, so I know both sides.

HOW TO GET INTO THE AMA JOB MARKET
First, at least a couple months before the conference, find where it will be. It’s called the American Marketing Association Summer Educator’s Conference. Strange name, I know. Insiders just call it “The AMA”. Get yourself a room in the conference hotel, preferably on the floor where the express elevator meets the local elevator for the upper floors. You’ll be hanging out on this floor waiting to change elevators anyway, so you might as well start there.

Next, get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA. It helps if this person is in Marketing. Get 1 or 2 other letters of recommendation, a CV, and some choice pubs. Put them in an envelope and mail them out to a friend of your sponsor at the desired school. It should look like the letter is coming from your sponsor, even though you are doing the actual assembly and mailing. Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized. Certainly send one to the recruiting coordinator (you might find their name on hiring announcements, which are often sent to your home department’s secretary) and one to your sponsor’s friend. Mail to schools regardless of whether they are advertising a position or not. This is academia: nobody knows anything. This means you may be sending 50 or more packets. You want to have them mailed by the 4^th of July at the absolute latest.

THEN WHAT?
Wait to get calls or emails from schools wishing to set up AMA interviews with you. These calls may come in as late as one week before the conference. Often they come when you are sitting outside having a drink with friends. Some schools will not invite you for totally unknown reasons. You may get interviews from the top 10 schools and rejected from the 30th-ranked one. Don’t sweat it. Again, this is the land of total and absolute unpredictability that you’re entering into. Also, know that just because you get an interview doesn’t mean they have a job. Sometimes schools don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have funding for a post. Still, you’ll want to meet with them anyway. Other times, schools are quite certain they have two positions, but then later university politics shift and they turn out to have none.

After the AMA, you’ll hopefully get “fly-outs,” that is, offers to come and visit the campus and give a talk. This means you’ve made the top five or so. Most offers go down in December. There’s a second market that happens after all the schools realize they’ve made offers to the same person. Of course, some schools get wise to this and don’t make offers to amazing people who would have come. We need some kind of market mechanism to work out this part of the system.

THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP” RULE
Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that he or she will not be your colleague in the future. You should then think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend. You’ll need friends to collaborate, to get tenure, get grants, and to go on the market again if you’re not happy with what you get.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IN WHICH ROOM TO INTERVIEW?
The schools will leave messages for you telling you in which rooms your interviews will be. You’ll get calls, emails, and notes held for you at the hotel reception. Some schools will fail to get in touch with you so you have to try to find them. Many profs ask the hotel to make their room number public, but for some reason many hotel operators will still not give you the room number. Naturally having a laptop and internet connection allows for emailing of room numbers. Try to take care of this early on the first day.

HOW TO TREAT YOURSELF WHILE THERE
My sponsor gave me the advice of not going out at night and getting room service for breakfast and dinner. This worked for me. Also, the ridiculously high price of a room-service breakfast made me feel like I was sparing no expense, which I found strangely motivating.

HOW DO THE ACTUAL AMA INTERVIEWS GO?
At the pre-arranged time you will knock on their hotel room door. You will be let into a suite (p=.4) or a normal hotel room (p=.5, but see below). In the latter case, there will be professors with long and illustrious titles—people you once imagined as dignified—sitting on beds in their socks. The other people in the room may not look at you when you walk in because they will be looking for a precious few seconds at your CV. For at least some people in the room, this may be the first time they have concentrated on your CV. Yikes is right. Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.

THE SEAT OF HONOR
There will be one armchair in the room. Someone will motion towards the armchair, smile, and say, “You get the seat of honor!” This will happen at every school, at every interview, for three days. I promise.

THE TIME COURSE
There will be two minutes of pleasant chit-chat. They will propose that you talk first and they talk next. There will be a little table next to the chair on which you will put your flip book of slides. You will present for 30 minutes, taking their questions as they come. They will be very nice. When done, they will ask you if you have anything to ask them. You of course do not. You hate this question. You make something up. Don’t worry, they too have a spiel, and all you need to do is find a way to get them started on it. By the time they are done, it’s time for you to leave. The whole experience will feel like it went rather well.

PREDICTING IF YOU WILL GET A FLY-OUT
It’s impossible to tell from how it seems to have gone whether they will give you a fly-out or not. Again, this is the land of staggering and high-impact uncertainty. They might not invite you because you were too bad (and they don’t want you), or because you were too good (and they think they don’t stand a chance of getting you).

DO INTERVIEWS DEVIATE FROM THAT MODEL?
Yes.

Sometimes instead of a hotel room, they will have a private meeting room (p=.075). Sometimes they will have a private meeting room with fruit, coffee, and bottled water (p=.025). Sometimes, they will fall asleep while you are speaking (p=.05). Sometimes they will be rude to you (p=.025). Sometimes a key person will miss an early interview due to a hangover (p=.025). Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day, they will offer you alcohol (p=.18, conditional on it being the end of the day).

HOW YOU THINK THE PROCESS WORKS
The committee has read your CV and cover letter and looked at your pubs. They know your topic and can instantly appreciate that what you are doing is important. They know the value of each journal you have published in and each prize you’ve won. They know your advisor and the strengths she or he instills into each student. They ignore what they’re supposed to ignore and assume everything they’re supposed to assume. They’ll attach a very small weight to the interview and fly you out based on your record, which is the right thing to do according to a mountain of research on interviews.

HOW THE PROCESS REALLY WORKS
The interviewers will have looked at your CV for about one minute a couple months ago, and for a few seconds as you walked in the room. They will never have read your entire cover letter, and they will have forgotten most of what they did read. They could care less about your advisor and will get offended that you didn’t cite their advisor. They’ll pay attention to everything they’re supposed to ignore and assume nothing except what you repeat five times. Flouting 50 years of research in judgment and decision-making, they’ll attach a small weight to your CV and fly you out based on your interview.

IF ENGLISH IS NOT YOUR MOTHER TONGUE
Your ability to speak English well won’t get you a good job, but your inability to do so will eliminate you from consideration at every top school. Understand that business schools put a premium on teaching. If the interviewers don’t think you can communicate in the classroom, they’re probably not going to take a chance on you. If you are just starting out and your spoken English is shaky, my advice is to work on it as hard as you are working on anything else. Hire a dialect coach (expensive) or an english-speaking actor or improviser (cheaper) to work with you on your English pronunciation. In the Internet age, it’s quite easy to download samples of English conversational speech, for instance from podcasts, for free. It’s also very easy to get a cheap headset and a free audio recorder (like Audacity) with which to practice.

TWO WAYS TO GIVE YOUR SPIEL
1) The plow. You start and the first slide and go through them until the last slide. Stop when interrupted and get back on track.

2) The volley. Keep the slides closed and just talk with the people about your topic. Get them to converse with you, to ask you questions, to ask for clarifications. When you need to show them something, open up the presentation and show them just that slide.

I did the plow the first year and the volley the second year. I got four times more fly-outs the second year. Econometricians are working hard to determine if there was causality.

HOW TO ACT
Make no mistake, you are an actor auditioning for a part. There will be no energy in the room when you arrive. You have to be like Santa Claus bringing in a large sack of energy. The interviewers will be tired. They’ve been listening to people in a stuffy hotel room from dawn till dusk for days. If you do an average job, you lose: You have to be two standard deviations above the mean to get a fly-out. So audition for the part, and make yourself stand out. If you want to learn how actors audition, read Audition by Michael Shurtleff.

SOCIAL SKILLS MATTER
From the candidate’s point of view, everything is about the CV and the correctness of the mathematical proofs in the job market paper. However, for better or for worse, extra-academic qualities matter. Here are two examples. 1) The Social Lubricant factor. Departments get visitors all the time: guest speakers, visiting professors, job candidates, etc. Some departments are a bunch of folks who stare at their shoes when introduced to a new person. These departments have a real problem: they have nobody on board who can make visitors feel at ease, and sooner or later word starts to spread about how socially awkward the people at University X are. To fix such problems, departments sometimes hire socially-skilled types who know how to make people comfortable in conversation, and who know how to ask good questions during talks. Also, interviewers assume that people who can talk a good game will be star teachers. 2) The Soft Sell factor. Many people succeed in academia not because they are often right, but also because they are masters of making other people feel like they aren’t wrong. Defensiveness or determination to embarrass when responding to critique is a sure way to blow an interview.

HAVE A QUIRK
One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you. My quirk is that I worked internationally as an actor and theater director for over 10 years; I even had a bit part in a Conan O’Brien sketch on TV. It has nothing to do my research, but people always bring up this odd little fact when I do campus visits. Some bits of trivia are just more memorable than others.

DON’T GIVE UP
Never think it’s hopeless. Just because you’re not two SDs above the mean at the school of your dreams, it does not mean you’re not the dream candidate of another perfectly good school.

Many candidates don’t realize the following: The students are competing for schools but the schools are also competing for students. If you strike out, you can just try again next year. I know a person in Psychology who got 70 rejections in one year. I know a person in Marketing who was told he didn’t place in the top 60 candidates at the 20th ranked school. The subsequent year, both people got hired by top 5 departments. One of them is ridiculously famous!

RUMORS
Gossip can mess with your chances. Gossip that you are doing well can hurt you because schools will be afraid to invite you if they think you won’t come. Gossip that you are doing poorly can hurt you because schools that like you will be afraid to invite you if they think no one else does. Sometimes people will ask a prof at your school if you would come to their school, and the prof will then ask you. To heck with that. Just say that if they want to talk to you, they should talk with you directly.

The danger of rumors can be summed up by the following story. At ACR in 2003, I was having a beer with someone who confessed, “you know, my friend X at school Y told me that they want to hire you, but they’re afraid your wife won’t move to Z”. I was single.

SHARE YOUR OWN AMA HORROR STORIES
I am more than happy to publish anonymous AMA horror stories as part of this post. You can reach me at dan at dangoldstein dot com.

JOBS FOR THE PRE- AND POST-DOCTORAL OF THE WORLD

Those job-seeking, PhD-wielding, DSN-reading, decision-making researchers will be happy to know that we’ve got four post-doctoral positions, hot off the griddle. Have everything but the PhD? We have two pre-doctoral opportunities for you this week as well.

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University of Colorado-Boulder

The University of Colorado-Boulder anticipates hiring a post-doctoral research associate in the interdisciplinary Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. Basic research in judgment and decision making, psychology, consumer research, and behavioral economics can inform our understanding of financial decisions such as choosing a mortgage, saving for retirement, decumulating savings, using credit cards, and paying for health care. The Center will conduct basic research and more applied work to inform public policy.

This would be two-year position, with a start date of August 1, 2010. The associate will conduct research with Professor John Lynch in the Leeds School of Business and with other colleagues in business and psychology.

http://leeds.colorado.edu/Directory/interior.aspx?id=8054

The associate will collaborate on projects relating to the roles of comprehension, attention, affect, and intertemporal planning on financial decision making. One area of focus will be how soon-to-be retirees make decisions about annuitization of savings. Another focus is decision aids for complex financial decisions such as choosing a mortgage, taking into account theories of the psychology of decision-making.

The ideal candidate would be an accomplished psychology PhD interested in seeking a faculty position in consumer research and marketing. Marketing departments at most leading business schools have a history hiring psychology PhDs whose work has implications for consumer behavior. They seek scholars who can publish in the top journals both in marketing / consumer research and allied basic disciplines. They also require that these scholars demonstrate that they can teach effectively in a business school setting.

This associateship is designed to help the scholar achieve these goals. The Associate will work in the lab at the Center for Research on Consumers’ Financial Decision Making and in the psychology department and collaborate on research aimed at journals in both psychology and consumer research. If so desired, the associate can teach one undergraduate section of marketing research per year in the Leeds School of Business under Lynch’s supervision for additional salary.

This position is open to candidates with behavioral research experience, data analysis and modeling skills, and training in judgment and decision-making, social psychology, cognitive psychology, or a related

Discipline. Candidate should have recently earned PhD or who are expecting their doctorate in 2010, on a topic relevant to issues in financial decision-making, broadly defined. To get a sense of the scope of such topics, please see the website for the First Annual Boulder Summer Conference on Consumers’ Financial Decision Making, http://cfdmc.colorado.edu/ including the conference program.

Application materials should be should be submitted online to http://www.jobsatcu.com/. Click on Search Postings and enter the job posting number 809691. Applications should include a CV, two letters of recommendation, reprints of published papers, and a cover letter. The cover letter should describe your research interests and expertise, your computer and data analysis skills, and should point out any connections to the research programs of Lynch. The Recruiting Committee Chair is John Lynch (john.g.lynch at colorado.edu), the Ted G. Anderson Professor at CU.

Review of applications will start April 1st and continue until April 30th.

The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

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Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is seeking candidates for a Post-doctoral Research Associate for a large-scale field study examining consumer response to enhanced methods for controlling electricity use at home. The research team includes psychology, economics, and engineering. Duties will include participation in research design and execution, supervision of data files and analyses, report writing, and coordination with electric utility partners.

Requirements: PhD in psychology or related behavioral science; relevant research experience. Project begins March 2010. Supported by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Carnegie Mellon University.

Applications must include a CV, an example of written work, and a cover letter indicating your related experiences and interest in the position. Applications should be sent by email to: lave at cmu.edu

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Michigan State University

We are looking for a postdoc researcher to work on a project on the neural mechanisms of decision making. This is a joint position between the Neuroimaging of Perception and Attention Laboratory (PI: Taosheng Liu) and the Laboratory of Cognitive and Decision Sciences (PI: Timothy Pleskac). The research project will use mathematical models to fit choice behavioral data and fMRI to measure brain activity in decision tasks. We aim to combine these approaches to probe the fundamental mechanisms of decision making.

The ideal candidate should have a strong background in mathematical models of decision making and/or a strong background in system/ cognitive neuroscience. Prior experience with mathematical modeling, fMRI, and strong programming skills (e.g., C/C++, Matlab) are highly preferred. Duties include designing and implementing experiments, data collection and analysis, and writing and presenting results. Our labs are affiliated with the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program in the Department of Psychology, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Neuroscience Program at Michigan State University. The candidate will receive further training in modeling and fMRI methodologies, as well as have opportunities to interact with a diverse body of scientists in cognitive and neural science. A recent PhD in a relevant discipline (e.g., psychology, neuroscience, computer science) is required and salary will commensurate with experience. The appointment is for one year with the possibility for renewal for two years pending availability of funds. The targeted starting date is summer/early fall of 2010.

Interested candidate should send a C.V., pdfs of representative publications, a brief statement of research, and names and addresses of at least two referees to either Tim Pleskac (pleskact at msu.edu) or Taosheng Liu (tsliu at msu.edu). Informal inquiries are also welcome. Review of candidates will begin May 1 and will continue until the position is filled.

For more information see the following websites:
Tim Pleskac’s lab page: http://www.msu.edu/~pleskact
Taosheng Liu’s lab page: http://psychology.msu.edu/liulab

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Applied Biomathematics

Applied Biomathematics (www.ramas.com/research.htm) anticipates an opening for a one- or two-year post doctoral position for a mathematical psychologist working in the area of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty in decision making. The project addresses risk communication from a biological perspective (see Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence, Experience, 2008, edited by Tucker et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 1128). Post docs at Applied Biomathematics commonly go on to academic appointments. The project will be directed by Scott Ferson (www.ramas.com/sferson.htm) and Christian Luhmann of Stony Brook University (www.psychology.sunysb.edu/cluhmann-/luhmann). Please send curriculum vitae and a writing sample to admin at ramas.com.

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Pre-doc specials: University of Basel

2 Doctoral Positions in Psychology at the University of Basel, Switzerland

The Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences (www.cds.unibas.ch – headed by Ralph Hertwig) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Basel is seeking two new Ph.D. students for the following projects:

A) Executive Search Processes and Decision Making in Long-Term Memory

This research will focus on the processes of encoding and retrieval in long-term memory, and how executive processes dynamically guide search in memory representations similar to the way animals search for food in space. Interested applicants should have a Master’s degree in Psychology and an interest in cognitive modeling and experimental approaches to memory.

B) Dialectical Bootstrapping: A New Paradigm to Improve Individual Judgment

This research focuses on the process of creating “the wisdom of crowds” within the mind of a single person by using “dialectical bootstrapping”—averaging a person’s two estimates so that errors are likely to cancel each other out. Interested applicants should have a Master’s degree in Psychology and an interest in cognitive modeling and judgment and decision making.

Applicants should send a CV, a letter of interest and two letters of recommendation to Dr. Thomas Hills at thomas.hills at unibas.ch (for project A) or Dr. Stefan Herzog at stefan.herzog at unibas.ch (for project B). Deadline for applications is April 30, 2010. The position is available immediately.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/143186839/

MAX PLANCK SUMMER INSTITUTE ON BOUNDED RATIONALITY

This week, Decision Science News brings you a summer school and a few spring workshops. The summer school is the one at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, brought to you by Gerd Gigerenzer and Nobel laureate Smith and will feature a lecture by Ariel Rubenstein. Now, those are three people who know a thing or two about bounded rationality!

Foundations for an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory
05 – 12 July, 2010
Berlin, Germany

Directed by: Gerd Gigerenzer & Vernon Smith
Evening Lecture: Ariel Rubinstein
Location: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Deadline to apply: March 20th, 2010

It is our pleasure to announce the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2010 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory, which will take place from July 5th to 12th, 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The objective of the Summer Institute is to provide a platform for interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, economics, biology, philosophy, and neuroscience. It wants to push for a common understanding of the way Homo Sapiens forms decisions, challenging the reigning assumptions in the individual disciplines. This year, the evening lecture will be given by Ariel Rubinstein.

Talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 20th, 2010. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available at http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/SummerInstitute .

Please pass on this information to potential candidates from your own department or institute.

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INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CLINICAL REASONING

When: Saturday 17 April to Sunday 18 April 2010
Where: London, UK
Keynote speakers: Professor Valerie Reyna (Cornell University) and Professor Willem Kuyken (University of Exeter)
Sponsor: European Association for Decision Making (EADM)
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/medicine/research/hscr/seminars/iwcr/

The 5th International Workshop on Clinical Reasoning provides a forum for researchers who investigate the mental processes of clinicians making diagnostic and treatment decisions.

We welcome contributions that present empirical evidence, theoretical accounts as well as planned research. These are examples of topics that would be of interest: research into various modes of clinical reasoning (e.g. intuitive, analytical, heuristic, causal), the circumstances when the different modes may not be appropriate and lead to error, the types of knowledge involved, how the features of the task may influence reasoning, individual differences in reasoning, strategies for improving reasoning, methodologies for the study of clinical reasoning.

For the first time, the workshop will aim to bring together researchers of medical diagnostic reasoning and of psychodiagnostic reasoning (‘case formulation’), and thus provide the opportunity for cross-fertilisation between two domains that do not often interact.

Scientific Committee
York Hagmayer, University of Göttingen
Olga Kostopoulou, King’s College London
Cilia Witteman, Radboud University Nijmegen

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ASSISTING DECISION MAKERS: A WORKSHOP MEETING

When people find it difficult to make decisions, they may benefit from assistance given to them by other people. Those providing assistance may be experts in a particular domain (e.g., medicine, law, finance) or in the way that decisions should be made (decision support). There are four types of help that people may receive. First, they may be given information in some form that makes it easy for them to use. For example, this information may relate to risks associated with different choices. Second, they may receive advice from other people about an appropriate course of action or about some uncertain quantity, such as the risks or expected returns associated with different courses of action. Third, they may share their decision making process with the person assisting them. Fourth, they may have their decision made for them.

This workshop will focus on these approaches to assisting decision makers and on factors relevant to choosing which should be used in different situations. It is supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and it will be held at University College London on 15 and 16 April. Invited speakers include J Frank Yates (Michigan), Ilan Yaniv (Jerusalem), and Eric Stone (Wake Forest).

If you wish to present a poster of relevant work at the meeting, please send its title and a 150-word abstract to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) before 5pm on March 12th 2010. There may also be a few slots available for spoken presentations. Please let Matt know if you would be interested in filling one.

Attendance at the meeting incurs no cost but you need to register by sending an email to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) by 12 March 2010. He will confirm your registration and provide you with further details.

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We invite submissions to the following forthcoming conference:

Behavioural Finance Working Group Conference:

Topic: Fairness, Trust and Emotions in Finance.
Date: 1-2 July 2010
Venue: Behavioural Finance Working Group, Cass Business School, London, UK
Keynote Speaker: Robert Olsen, Institute of Behavioral Finance

Organisers: Richard Fairchild (School of Management, University of
Bath), Gulnur Muradoglu (Cass Business School) and Daniel Zizzo
(University of East Anglia).

Special Issue: Presenters have the option to have their papers
considered for a special issue of the International Journal of
Behavioural Accounting and Finance.

The deadline for submissions is May 21st 2010

The detailed Call for Papers is as follows:

Overview: Traditionally, financial economists have based their analysis
of financial contracting on the assumption that agents are fully
rational, emotionless, self-interested maximizers of expected utility
(the homo economicus assumption). Behavioural economists are
increasingly recognizing that financial decision makers may be subject
to psychological biases, and the effects of emotions (the homo sapiens
view). An interesting area of research examines the implications of
assuming that agents are not completely self-interested, but that they
also consider the impact of their actions on the payoffs of others. In
this meeting, we will consider the effects of fairness, trust, empathy,
fellow-feeling, and emotional reactions on financial contracting,
incentives and performance.

We seek contributions from areas which include while not being limited
to the following issues:

-decision-making at the corporate level (for example, the effect of
emotions, trust, and empathy on the FDI decision and on capital
budgeting),

-decision making at the start-up level (the effect of fairness, trust
and empathy on venture capitalist/entrepreneurial financial
contracting, incentives and performance),

-decision making at the investor level (investors’ trust in corporate
managers).

We invite you to submit extended abstracts, papers-in-progress or full
papers by the deadline of May 21st 2010.

The organisers will come back with a decision within three weeks after
this deadline.To submit a paper for consideration please email a PDF
version of the paper to [1]Behavioural-Finance@city.ac.uk

Papers chosen for submission will, at the author’s request, be
considered for publication for a Special Issue of the International
Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance

Kind regards,
Gulnur Muradoglu
Cass Business School

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH 2010 CONFERENCE

Conference Announcement and Call for Submissions
Conference website: http://www.acrweb.org/acr/

The 2010 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research will be held at the Hyatt Regency Riverfront in Jacksonville, FLfrom Thursday, October 7 through Sunday, October 10, 2010.

The theme of ACR 2010 is: Think BIGBig Ideas. Big Findings. We would like to promote research that has a big picture focus. Big picture research either involves building theories that apply to a wide range of phenomena or discovering “big” phenomena that are of real importance to consumers’ lives. We also would like to promote a big picture way of communicating findings and theories at the conference. We would like talks to focus on the main ideas at the expense of detail. Several changes at this year’s conference reflect the Think Big theme. Every special session will have four, shorter talks. Session chairs are asked to kick-start discussion about big picture implications at the end of special and competitive paper sessions. Abstracts in the program will be shorter, encouraging authors to clearly communicate their big picture ideas. Finally, we will appeal to reviewers and Associate Editors to err on the side of big picture contributions instead of methodological perfection.

The conference format will follow that of past years. A pre-conference Doctoral Symposium will be held Thursday (co-chaired by Priya Raghubir and Patti Williams). Thursday evening will feature an opening reception for ACR 2010. The conference program on Friday and Saturday will include competitive paper sessions, special sessions, roundtable discussions, poster sessions, and the film festival. A gala reception will be held Saturday evening.

Format and Program Structure
There are five submission types for ACR 2010.

1. Competitive Papers represent the completed original work of their authors. The ACR conference associate editors and co-chairs assign papers to sessions that reflect similar scholarly interests.
2. Special Sessions provide opportunities for focused attention on significant areas of research. Successful sessions shed light on a specific research area. They raise questions about the state of the area and open avenues for future research.
3. Films at the film festival sessions provide video insight into consumer topics.
4. Roundtables encourage intensive participant discussion of discussion-worthy topics.
5. Poster Sessions present findings from a current working paper. Authors display posters of their research, distribute their papers, and are available to discuss and answer questions during the assigned poster session

A paper submitted in one track cannot be considered in any other track if it is rejected.

Submission and Decision Deadlines

All submissions (for competitive papers, special sessions, films, posters and roundtables) must be received by Monday, March 1, 2010 by 5:00 pm Jacksonville time (EST). Note that this is earlier than last year’s deadline. In order to maintain accessibility to a wide range of participants, each attendee 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 2, 2010.

General Submission Requirements

1. Submissions should not already be published, or accepted for publication in any journal. Submissions should also not include content that has been presented at earlier North American ACR conferences.
2. It is mandatory that all accepted papers are presented at the conference by an author.

Submission Procedures
All submission activity (submissions, reviews and notifications) for ACR 2010 will be electronic, through the conference website (URL:http://www.acrweb.org/acr/).

In order to use the conference website (e.g., to submit a manuscript or provide a review), you will need to sign up at and create a user profile (follow the online instructions). If you are already signed up (i.e., if you have used this ACR conference management system in the past), please log in to the system and update your user profile (content and methods codes). To log in and update your profile, please click here .”

Any time you log on to the website, you will see the following message: “To submit a paper or a proposal, please click here. ” Please click on the link and follow the instructions.

All submissions to the 2010 ACR Conference website require the following information:

• Submission Type: Competitive Paper, Special Session, Film, Poster, Roundtable.
• Title of Submission
• Primary Contact Information: name, affiliation, mailing address, phone number and email address for the author who serves as the primary contact
• Names of Co-authors/Other Participants and their affiliations, and whether they are presenting author(s).
• Content Area Codes and Methodological Area Codes for your submission (These are critical for assigning reviewers – please pick codes that provide the best match to your work).
• Declaration that the submission has not been accepted for publication elsewhere.
• Signed copyright release form.
Use Word 2003 or Rich Text Format file format to upload.
Use consistent author name: All authors need to ensure that their names appear in the same way in all submissions. This is because the database will consider Gita Johar, Gita V. Johar, and Gita Venkataramani Johar as three different authors and may result in a program that has Gita presenting at the same time in three different rooms.
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: ACR2010@chilleesys.com.

Specific Information for each Type of Submission

Please see the conference website: http://www.acrweb.org/acr/

Contact info
All program-related queries:
Email: ACR2010@rsm.nl

All administrative questions, such as, hotel, payment, registration, dietary restrictions:
Email: acr@acrwebsite.org

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/