HARVARD CENTER FOR RISK ANALYSIS QUIZ ON CAUSES OF DEATH The folks at Risk World let me know about this mini-quiz on odds of various causes of death at Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis. It’s a lot more fun if you take the time before going to that page to complete the following quiz. The […]
WHEN TO STOP INFORMATION SEARCH? Today’s highlight article comes from Dan Gilbert’s mention of it in his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece: “Two psychologists, Peter Ditto and David Lopez, told subjects that they were being tested for a dangerous enzyme deficiency. Subjects placed a drop of saliva on a test strip and waited to […]
R STATISTICAL LANGUAGE MULTI-SITE SEARCH Image (C) R Foundation, from http://www.r-project.org Decision researchers and fellow bloggers Jon Baron and Andrew Gelman are big fans and supporters of the R project for statistical computing. Searching for information on R can be difficult (though Baron’s R search tool is a great help), so DSN has put together […]
ANNOUNCING THE JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING JOURNAL Jon Baron has announced A new online journal for judgment and decision making. A new journal is always a risk. If people will read it and cite it, submitting there now is wise. If nobody will read it or cite it, submitting there now is foolish. In an […]
THE RECOGNITION HEURISTIC ON ESPN.COM Bill Simmons just ran a nice interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in which he draws on a recognition heuristic example of when more knowledge is worse than less. “Simmons: While we’re on the subject of the Knicks, please enlighten the readers on your convoluted theory about why Isiah Thomas is a […]
ARE DEFAULT EFFECTS CAUSED BY PUBLIC IGNORANCE? A debate on the Becker-Posner blog includes this hunch by Posner: One possible reason the weak default rule appears to have a significant effect is public ignorance. The probability that one’s organs will be harvested for use in transplantation must be very slight–so slight that it doesn’t pay […]
MOUSELAB WEB To download a video, click on the image (996Kb AVI). Friends of DSN Eric Johnson and Martijn Willemsen have created an online version of the popular decision research tool MouseLab. MouselabWEB is a process tracing tool that can be used to monitor the information acquisition process of decision makers on the web (and […]
THE DISTRIBUTION BUILDER To download a video, click on the image (6.7MB AVI). The Distribution Builder is a tool that lets people specify the probability distributions of risk they would like to have apply to their own future. Think about using it to choose the outcomes you’d like to see from your investments, insurance policies, […]
SOME EASY THINGS TO DO TO IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF SUCCESS AS AN ACADEMIC Decision Science News was recently asked to give a talk on simple strategies for doing research. Rewrite things many times. Someone, perhaps Woody Allen, said “Writing is hard. Rewriting is easy.” Write as if you’re writing the final version. If it […]
COMPETITOR-ORIENTED OBJECTIVES: THE MYTH OF MARKET SHARE You run a business. An advocate of focus, you decide to put all your energies behind one pursuit. You come down to a list of two candidates: Strive to maximize market share Strive to maximize profit Perhaps the difference is hard to see at first. They are correlated. […]
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