Decision Science News

VISUALIZING COUNTRIES IN TERMS OF US STATES

Syria is about the size of Florida with about the same population

 

 

Change how you see the world. Put things into perspective!

In our most labor-intensive post ever, Jake Hofman and I have created, for every country in the world, a way to think of that country’s area and population in terms of US states. It’s all part of a larger project improving comprehension of numbers in the news. [See our working paper, a longer version of which was recently accepted at CHI 2016].

You’ll see 13 fascinating examples below. Check them out and come back to …

… educate yourself and contribute valuable data

We’re trying to advance the science of examples. What example should a teacher or journalist use when putting a country into perspective? For instance, in the image above, we could have said that Syria is about the same size as Washington but with three times the population. This is factually more accurate, but might also be more difficult for people to remember or use. So we thought we might get some feedback from readers and find out what makes appealing examples

Please go here, hit “random”, vote for an example, hit “submit” and repeat until you’re bored silly. You’ll be advancing research that can help teachers, journalists, and scientists communicate better.

You can see every country here.

Afghanistan is about the size of Texas with about the same population

 

Australia is about 10 times the size of Texas with about the same population

 

 

Austria is about the size of Virginia with about the same population

 

 

China is about the size of The United States with about 4 times the population

 

 

Germany is about the size of California with about twice the population

 

 

Iraq is about the size of California with about the same population

 

 

Israel is about the size of New Jersey with about the same population

 

 

Japan is about the size of California with about 3 times the population

 

 

Kenya is about the size of Texas with about twice the population

 

 

North Korea is about the size of New York with about the same population

 

 

Philippines is about the size of New Mexico with about 50 times the population

 

 

Turkey is about the size of Texas with about 3 times the population

 

 

United Kingdom is about the size of Wyoming with about 100 times the population

 

 

We’ve done something similar before, but just for area, and it didn’t have pictures. This is so much better (and harder). Want to reward our hard work? Go here, hit “random”, and give us precious training data.

INTERVIEW SERIES WITH JUDGMENT AND DECISION-MAKING RESEARCHERS

JDM (Judgment and Decision Making) researchers like Reid Hastie and Tom Wallsten have participated in the online interview series “Talking about Decisions” produced by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Enjoy the interviews!

Talking about decisions with Reid Hastie

Talking about decisions with Tom Wallsten

The YouTube Channel also features lectures on decision making, for example:

Robin Hogarth on Why Simple Solutions aren’t

Kathleen Eisenhardt on Simple Rules

COBE SUBMISSION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 30, 2015

Call for Papers: Fourth Annual Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments (COBE 2016), a workshop at WWW 2016, Montreal, Canada

Overview
The World Wide Web has resulted in new and unanticipated avenues for conducting large-scale behavioral experiments. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, Upwork, TaskRabbit, 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.

The main purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers conducting behavioral experiments online to share new results, methods and best practices.

Basic Information
Submission Deadline: December 30, 2015
Notification Date: February 2, 2016
Workshop Date: TBA but between April 11 and 13th, 2016.
Cocktails: At the Bar
Location: Montreal, Canada. A workshop before the 25th International World Wide Web Conference: http://www2016.ca/ which takes place April 11-15, 2016.

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=cobe2016, 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 two (2) pages of text, with an optional extra page for figures and references only.

The submission deadline is December 30, 2015

Organizing Committee
Siddharth Suri, Microsoft Research NYC
Winter A. Mason, Facebook
Daniel G. Goldstein, Microsoft Research NYC & London Business School

Program Committee
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Pavel Atanasov, Polly Portfolio
Eytan Bakshy, Facebook
Laura Brandimarte, Carnegie Mellon University
Jesse J. Chandler, Mathematica
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Nicolas Della Penna, Australian National University
Dean Eckles, MIT Sloan School of Business
Alice Gao, University of British Columbia
Sam Gosling, University of Texas at Austin
John Horton, NYU Stern
Brian Keegan, Northeastern University
Peter Krafft, MIT
Andrew Mao, Microsoft Research
Akitaka Matsuo, Nuffield College, Oxford University
Gabriele Paolacci, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Eyal Pe’Er, Bar-Ilan University
Ragan Petrie, George Mason University
Alexander Peysakhovich, Facebook
David Rand, Yale Unviersity
David Rothschild, Microsoft Research
Sven Seuken, University of Zurich
Sean Taylor, Facebook
Florian Teschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Microsoft Research
Jens Witkowski, ETH Zurich
Georgios Zervas, Boston University School of Management
Peter Zubcsek, University of Florida Warrington College of Business

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE DECEMBER 12, 2015

What: Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making
When: May 22nd – 24th, 2016
Where: St. Julien Hotel, Boulder, Colorado
Deadline: December 12, 2015

Conference Overview
The Boulder Summer Conference in Consumer Financial Decision Making, now in its 7th year, is the world’s foremost interdisciplinary conference for discussion of research on consumer financial decision-making. Our goal is to stimulate cross-disciplinary conversation and improve basic and applied research in the emerging area of consumer financial decision-making. This research can inform our understanding of how consumers actually make such decisions and how consumers can be helped to make better decisions by innovations in public policy, business, and consumer education. Please see the 2015 program on the conference website to see abstracts of research by scholars in economics, psychology, sociology, behavioral finance, consumer research, decision sciences, behavioral economics, and law. Our format allows a very high level of opportunity for conversation and interaction around the ideas presented.

Submitting Abstracts for the 2016 Conference
To submit an extended abstract (1 page single spaced pdf), please visit the conference website and click on the Submit Paper Abstract link.

The conference co-chairs will select papers for presentation at the conference based on extended abstracts. Selected papers must not be published prior to the conference, but those researchers presenting their work at the conference must commit to have a paper that is complete and available for review by discussants one month prior to the conference. Selections will be based on quality, relevance to consumers’ financial decision-making, and contribution to breadth of topics and disciplinary approaches. We consider not just the individual merits of the papers, but how they pair with another submission from a scholar in a different field. The organizers will invite authors of the best papers not selected for presentation at a plenary session to present their work at the Sunday evening poster session.

The abstract submission deadline is December 12, 2015

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 2016 CONFERENCE AND RELATED EVENTS

SJDM Conference
This year’s (2015) SJDM annual conference will be in Chicago, Illinois, at the Chicago Hilton, November 20-23. Late registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20.

• The 2015 final program.
• Poster guidelines
• Talk guidelines

As of now you must register when you arrive at the meeting. The registration fee is $410 for regular members, $445 for non-members, and $205 for student members. Membership dues are still $35 ($10 for students).

This year’s program committee is Katherine Milkman (chair), Jack Soll, Nina Mazar, and Suzanne Shu

Tribute to Paul Slovic
A tribute for Paul Slovic that will take place Friday, November 20 from 5:30-7:30pm at the conference hotel (Hilton – Williford Room).

The program will celebrate Paul’s major contributions to research on preference construction, risk perception, and decisions by analysis versus decisions by feelings. It will highlight his influence on generations of JDM and other scholars and his leadership in using his work to address real world social problems. Ellen Peters will chair the session. The speakers will include well-known experts in risk perception and decision research including Daniel Kahneman, Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Kunreuther, John Payne, Bob O’Connor, Melissa Finucane, Bill Burns, Daniel Vastfjall, and Scott Slovic. Their presentations will build on Paul’s contributions, showing their relevance to current research and their promise for influencing future developments.We may even get Paul to say a few words at the end! The tribute is organized by Ellen Peters (Chair), John Payne, Craig Fox, and Melissa Finucane.

Neuroeconomics social
There will be an inaugural Society for Neuroeconomics mixer at SJDM. Whether you identify as a decision neuroscientist, neuroeconomist, or consumer neuroscientist, you are welcome at an evening of socializing and networking. Meet up with your old friends and make some new ones at this social during SJDM. Ian Krajbich and Crystal Reeck are organizing.

Date: Saturday, November 21, 2015
Time: 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: First Draft craft beer house – 649 S Clark http://www.firstdraftchicago.com/

Photo credit:https://flic.kr/p/p6HUhT

BEHAVIORAL DECISION RESEARCH IN MANAGEMENT (BDRM) AT TORONTO’S ROTMAN SCHOOL

What: Behavioral Decision Research in Management 2016 Conference
Where: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
When: June 9-11, 2016

Submissions of papers are invited for the 15th biennial conference on Behavioral Decision Research in Management (#BDRM2016), to be held at the Rotman School of Management, Toronto, Canada, on June 9-11, 2016.

BDRM is the leading conference for behavioural research conducted in business schools. We encourage submissions of original work in all areas of behavioural research including, but not limited to, the areas of decision making, consumer behaviour, experimental and behavioural economics, decision analysis, behavioural finance, organizational behaviour, negotiation, behavioural strategy, behavioural operations research, behavioural accounting, and medical and legal decision making.

We are glad to announce the following keynote speakers:

Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich
Elke U. Weber, Columbia University

Submission information and deadlines

Submissions for the BDRM conference are due by December 30, 2015. Notification of acceptances will be sent in late March 2016.

Abstract should include a brief description of the research problem, the key methodology and assumptions, and a summary of major results and implications. Abstracts will be selected for oral presentation by blind review (no author names or affiliations should appear on the abstracts).

Abstracts should not exceed three (3) pages double-spaced, Times New Roman, font size 12, and can be submitted in Word or .pdf format. No math symbols should be used and tables and diagrams should be minimal.

Each participant may present only one paper. When submitting papers to this conference, you must agree to be available at any time on June 10 and June 11, 2016 to give your presentation. If you will not be available on one of these days, please arrange for a co-author to give the presentation. We will not consider date/time change requests for presentations.

We will be grouping four competitive papers into a single 75 minute session. Each author will have approximately 15 minutes to present their work. The last 15 minutes will be dedicated to questions.

Papers accepted by the reviewers will be conditionally accepted until at least one author registers for the conference.

All submissions will be conducted electronically through the conference website. The website is now open to submissions.
The conference website provides additional information about the conference, including accommodations:

http://inside.rotman.utoronto.ca/bdrm2016/

Conference co-chairs:
Sanford DeVoe, Tanjim Hossain, Nina Mazar, Claire Tsai, Min Zhao, Chenbo Zhong

ACM CONFERENCE ON ECONOMICS AND COMPUTATION (ACM EC’16) CALL FOR PAPERS

Come see Maastricht’s progress since 1580

The 17th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation will take place July 24-28, 2016 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Conference overview

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom) has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, systems, and applications at the interface of economics and computation, including applications to electronic commerce.

The Seventeenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’16) will feature invited speakers, paper presentations, workshops, tutorials, and poster sessions. EC’16 will be co-located with the 5th World Congress of the Game Theory Society (GAMES 2016), http://www.games2016.nl/, in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

The conference will be held from Sunday, July 24, 2016 through Thursday, July 28, 2016 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Accepted technical papers will be presented from July 26 through July 28; tutorials and workshops will be held on July 24 and July 25. Accepted papers will be available in the form in which they are published in the ACM Digital Library prior to the conference. AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

The focus of the conference is research at the interface of economics and computation related to (but not limited to) the following three non-exclusive focus areas: Theory and Foundations; Artificial Intelligence and Applied Game Theory; Experimental, Empirical, and Applications

Authors can designate a paper for one or two of these focus areas. Each area has dedicated Senior Program Committee (SPC) and Program Committee (PC) members to allow appropriate review of papers.

We are committed to accepting papers of the very highest quality. If we receive a large number of such submissions we will hold some sessions in parallel, grouping these sessions by topic rather than by area.

EC publishes relevant papers on topics and methodologies that include:

Auction theory
Automated agents
Bargaining and negotiation
Behavioral models and experiments
Computational game theory
Computational social choice
Consumer search and online behavior
Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence Econometrics Economics of information Equilibrium computation Experience with e-commerce systems and markets Foundations of incentive compatibility Game-theoretic models of e-commerce and the Internet Information elicitation Machine learning Market algorithms Market design Market equilibrium Matching Mechanism design Platforms and services Prediction markets Preferences and decision theory Price of anarchy Privacy Recommender systems Reputation and trust systems Revenue optimization, pricing, and payments Social networks Sponsored search and other electronic marketing Trading agents Usability and human factors in e-commerce applications User-generated content and peer production

PAPER SUBMISSION

Submissions should be made at http://www.sigecom.org/ec16/papers.html

The conference is soliciting full papers (as well as workshop and tutorial proposals; see below) on all aspects of research covered by the conference. Submitted papers should clearly establish the research contribution, its relevance, and its relation to prior research. All submissions must be made in the appropriate format, and within a specified length limit; details and a LaTeX template can be found at the submission site. Additional pages beyond the length limit may be included as appendices, but will only be read at the discretion of the reviewers.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can ask that only a one page abstract of the paper appear in the proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper. Authors should guarantee the link to be reliable for at least two years. This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in a conference proceedings. Such papers must be submitted electronically and formatted just like papers submitted for full-text publication.

Simultaneous submission of results to another conference with published proceedings is not allowed. Results previously published or presented at another primarily archival conference prior to EC, or published (or accepted for publication) at a journal prior to the submission deadline to EC, will not be considered. Simultaneous submission of results to a journal is allowed only if the author intends to publish the paper as a one page abstract in EC’16. Papers that are accepted and appear as a one page abstract can be subsequently submitted for publication in a journal but may not be submitted to any other conference that has a published proceedings.

A separate call for posters will be announced later.

WORKSHOP AND TUTORIAL PROPOSALS

The conference is soliciting proposals for tutorials and workshops to be held in conjunction with the conference. Tutorial proposals should contain the title of the tutorial, a two-page description of the topic matter, the names and short biographies of the tutor(s), and dates/venues where earlier versions of the tutorial were given (if any). Workshop proposals should contain the title of the workshop, the names and short biographies of the organizers, and the names of confirmed or candidate participants. Workshop proposals should also include a two-page description describing the theme, the reviewing process for participants, the organization of the workshop, and required facilities for the workshop. Informal ideas for workshops or tutorials can also be sent without a full proposal to the workshop and tutorial chairs at any time. Submission information can be found on the conference website.

KEY DATES

February 23, 2016: Full electronic paper submissions due. Please see http://www.sigecom.org/ec16/papers.html
March 8, 2016: Workshop and Tutorial proposals due. Send to: ec16-workshops-chair@acm.org and ec16-tutorial-chair@acm.org respectively March 22, 2016: Tutorial & workshop proposal accept/reject notifications April 19, 2016: Reviews sent to authors for author feedback April 22, 2016: Author responses due May 10, 2016: Paper accept/reject notifications May 30, 2016: Camera-ready version of accepted papers due July 24-25, 2016: Conference Workshops and Tutorials July 26-28, 2016: Conference Technical Program

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General Chair:
Vincent Conitzer, Duke University
ec16-general-chair@acm.org

Program Chairs:
Dirk Bergemann, Yale University
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
ec16-pc-chairs@acm.org

Workshop Chair:
Sebastien Lahaie, Microsoft Research
ec16-workshops-chair@acm.org

Tutorial Chair:
Ron Lavi, Technion
ec16-tutorial-chair@acm.org

Senior Program Committee:

Theory and Foundations:

Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research
Alessandro Bonatti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gabriel Carroll, Stanford University Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin–Madison Richard Cole, New York University Costis Daskalakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Michal Feldman, Tel Aviv University Jason Hartline, Northwestern University Robert Kleinberg, Cornell University & Microsoft Research Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University Vahab Mirrokni, Google Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania Philipp Strack, University of California, Berkeley Eva Tardos, Cornell University Glen Weyl, Microsoft Research

Artificial Intelligence and Applied Game Theory

Martin Bichler, TU München
Sushil Bikhchandani, University of California, Los Angeles Felix Brandt, TU München Arpita Ghosh, Cornell University Ian Kash, Microsoft Research Kate Larson, University of Waterloo Ariel Procaccia, Carnegie Mellon University Jenn Wortman Vaughan, Microsoft Research Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania Michael Wellman, University of Michigan

Experimental, Empirical, and Applications

Itai Ashlagi, Stanford University
Dan Goldstein, Microsoft Research
Panos Ipeirotis, New York University
Jakub Kastl, Princeton University
Dan Levin, Ohio State University
Muthu Muthukrishnan, Rutgers University
Georgios Zervas, Boston University

Image Credit: “Maastricht-Bellomonte” by Philippo Bellomonte – Drawing. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maastricht-Bellomonte.jpg#/media/File:Maastricht-Bellomonte.jpg

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PREDICTION

LINK
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

FROM THE PUBLISHER
Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?

In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are “superforecasters.”

In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Philip E. Tetlock is the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and holds appointments in the psychology and political science departments and the Wharton School of Business. He and his wife, Barbara Mellers, are the co-leaders of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year forecasting study. He is also the author of Expert Political Judgment and (with Aaron Belkin) Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics.

Dan Gardner is a journalist and the author of Risk and Future Babble: Why Pundits are Hedgehogs and Foxes Know Best.

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

The quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

This issue features the current program for the upcoming conference.

Enjoy!
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

NUMBERS AND NERVES

Check out this announcement of a new book by Paul Slovic and son: Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data

We live in the age of Big Data, awash in a sea of ever-expanding information—a constant deluge of facts, statistics, models, and projections. The human mind is quickly desensitized by information presented in the form of numbers, and yet many important social and environmental phenomena, ranging from genocide to global climate change, require quantitative description. The essays and interviews in Numbers and Nerves explore the quandary of our cognitive responses to quantitative information, while also offering compelling strategies for overcoming insensitivity to the meaning of such information. With contributions by journalists, literary critics, psychologists, naturalists, activists, and others, this book represents a unique convergence of psychological research, discourse analysis, and visual and narrative communication. Cognitive science has increasingly come to understand that we, as a species, think best when we allow numbers and nerves, abstract information and experiential discourse, to work together. This book provides a roadmap to guide that collaboration. It will be invaluable to scholars, educators, profes- sional communicators, and anyone who struggles to grasp the meaning behind the numbers.

CONTENTS

• Foreword: Headbone and Hormone: Adventures in the Arithmetic of Life by Robert Michael Pyle
• Introduction: The Psychophysics of Brightness and the Value of a Life by Scott Sovic & Paul Slovic
• The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Geocide by Paul Slovic & Daniel Västfjäll
• Psuedoinefficacy and the Arithmetic of Compassion by Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, & Marcus Mayorga
• The Prominence Effect: Confronting the Collapse of Humanitarian Values in Foreign Policy Decisions by Paul Slovic
• The Age of Numbing by Robert Jay Lifton & Greg Mitchell
• Epidemic Disease as Structural Violence: An Excerpt from Never Again? Reflections on Human Values and Human Rights by Paul Farmer
• The Power of One by Nicholas D. Kristof
• From One to Too Many by Kenneth Helphand
• The Wreck of Time by Annie Dillard
• Science, Eloquence, and the Asymmetry of Trust: What’s at Stake in Climate Change Fiction by Scott Slovic
• Healing Rwanda by Terry Tempest Williams
• When Words Fail: Climate Change Activists Have Chosen a Magic Number by Bill McKibben
• The Blood Root of Art by Rick Bass
• Reacting to Information in a Personal, Moral Way: An Interview with Homero & Betty Aridjis
• Countering the Anesthesia of Destruction: An Interview with Vandana Shiva
• The Meaning of One Data Point: An Interview with Sandra Steingraber
• Introspection, Social Transformation, and the Trans-Scalar Imaginary: An Interview with Chris Jordan