MISPLACED SYMPATHY Decision Science News knows that when faculty from London Business School travel abroad, they are frequently asked “how are things at the London School of Economics?” When the London Business School faculty members say politely that they are at LBS and not LSE, the askers suddenly look sympathetic, as if they’d inquired about […]
THE TECHNICAL DETAILS, TUTORIALS, WALK-THROUGHS A few posts back, we showed how classic decision making experiments are being replicated on Amazon’s insta-subject-pool otherwise know as Mechanical Turk (aka MT). After that, Steven Pinker, at the SJDM keynote, presented Mechanical-Turk-collected data on perceptions of whether the past or present is perceived as more violent. This week, […]
PROFILE OF A PIONEER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Decision Science News has learned that the creator of expectancy-value theory, Martin Fishbein, has died. From Icek Aizen: We report with great sadness that our friend and colleague, Martin Fishbein, died Friday, November 27 of a heart attack while on a visit to London. Marty was a professor […]
INCENTIVES TO STATE PROBABILITIES OF BELIEF TRUTHFULLY We have all been there. You are running an experiment in which you would like participants to tell you what they believe. In particular, you’d like them to tell you what they believe to be the probability that an event will occur. Normally, you would ask them. But […]
NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON THE APPEAL OF R (click to view movie) It is no secret that Decision Science News is crazy about the R language for statistical computing. Find out why R is so great in this New York Times article. Then start to teach yourself R with our short series of video […]
DEFAULTS IN BRUSSELS Last week, Decision Science News spoke at a European Commission conference on “How Can Behavioural Economics Improve Policies Affecting Consumers?“, which was terrifying, as it meant addressing a large room of people with name cards and microphones and simultaneous translators behind glass walls. The DSN editor tried to emphasize how one must […]
ASKING A LIBRARIAN There is an interesting post and discussion at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science about whether the Library of Congress stacks were ever open to the public. Andrew has detailed memories of roaming the stacks, including information on how they were configured (“like spokes on a wheel”), which if correct would […]
LEARN VI AND VIM BY WATCHING AND TYPING ALONG For this week, Decision Science News has created a vi and vim video tutorial. (The tutorial is best viewed in your browser’s full-screen mode, try pressing F11 in Windows). Vim is a free and open source editor. DSN highly recommends vim. This tutorial is for absolute […]
GET A FEELING FOR ACCIDENTAL SIGNIFICANCE Click through to site to try We were exploring Jerry Dallal’s site and came across this cute gizmo linked to as “a valuable lesson”. Clicking the button simulates running 20 significance tests, each of which has a 5% chance of coming up significant when no effect is present. Underneath […]
MAJOR CHOICE STRATEGIES The editor’s somewhat annotated copy of Hastie & Dawes Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes, in their classic Rational Choice in an Uncertain World (pp. 232-234), outline some “major choice strategies,” stemming from several schools including the Heuristics and Biases, Adaptive Decision Maker, and Fast and Frugal research programs: Strategy: DOMINANCE […]
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