Decision Science News

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

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

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM

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

SUBMISSIONS

The deadline for submissions is June 17, 2013. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org/. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster, Jon Baron, at webmaster@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Robyn LeBoeuf, at robyn.leboeuf at warrington.ufl.edu.

ELIGIBILITY

At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. You may join SJDM at http://www.sjdm.org/jdm-member.html. An individual may give only one talk and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters. Please note that both the membership rule and the one-talk/ one-poster rule will be enforced.

AWARDS

The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM. The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due June 17, 2013. Further details are available here. Questions can be directed to the chair of the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Committee, Tim Pleskac, pleskact@msu.edu. The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM meeting. Further details will be available at http://www.sjdm.org.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Robyn LeBoeuf (Chair), Bernd Figner, Jack Soll, Katy Milkman, Ellie Kyung, Anuj Shah, Katherine Burson, Ana Franco-Watkins, and Mare Appleby (conference coordinator)

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

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

Submission Deadline: April 26, 2013

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

OVERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ORGANIZATION:

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

SOME DOCTORS GET COMPLAINED ABOUT MORE THAN OTHERS. SPECIALTY MATTERS.

One topic in medical decision making that most people can relate to is the problem of choosing a doctor, especially when moving to a new town in which one knows few people from whom to receive references. One way to look at the problem is choosing a doctor you will likely not want to complain about. The likelihood of a doctor getting complaints is somewhat predictable, as shown in this recent article in BMJ Quality and Safety, based on a sample of almost 19,000 complaints filed by patients in Australia.

ABSTRACT

Objectives (1) To determine the distribution of formal patient complaints across Australia’s medical workforce and (2) to identify characteristics of doctors at high risk of incurring recurrent complaints.

Methods We assembled a national sample of all 18 907 formal patient complaints filed against doctors with health service ombudsmen (‘Commissions’) in Australia over an 11-year period. We analysed the distribution of complaints among practicing doctors. We then used recurrent-event survival analysis to identify characteristics of doctors at high risk of recurrent complaints, and to estimate each individual doctor’s risk of incurring future complaints.

Results The distribution of complaints among doctors was highly skewed: 3% of Australia’s medical workforce accounted for 49% of complaints and 1% accounted for a quarter of complaints. Short-term risks of recurrence varied significantly among doctors: there was a strong dose-response relationship with number of previous complaints and significant differences by doctor specialty and sex. At the practitioner level, risks varied widely, from doctors with <10% risk of further complaints within 2 years to doctors with >80% risk.

Conclusions A small group of doctors accounts for half of all patient complaints lodged with Australian Commissions. It is feasible to predict which doctors are at high risk of incurring more complaints in the near future. Widespread use of this approach to identify high-risk doctors and target quality improvement efforts coupled with effective interventions, could help reduce adverse events and patient dissatisfaction in health systems.

Before jumping to the conclusion that there good and bad apples in the world, realize that things that have little to do with the doctor, such as specialty, play a role:

That is, regardless of the doctor, those seeking plastic surgery are much more likely to file complaints than others.

Interestingly, experience doesn’t seem to help. In fact, doctors under 35 are significantly less likely to generate complaints than those age 36 and over.

REFERENCE
M. M. Bismark, M. J. Spittal, L. C. Gurrin, M. Ward, D. M. Studdert. Identification of doctors at risk of recurrent complaints: a national study of healthcare complaints in Australia. BMJ Quality & Safety, 2013; DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs-2012-001691

Full text
Supplementary materials

MORE ON EXERCISE EQUIVALENTS VS CALORIE COUNTS ON MENUS

We’ve written before about exercise equivalents over calorie counts, citing some initial encouraging data. Now there are more data, also encouraging.

The new article is called Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals. These authors tested four variant menus “(1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories”. The authors found, as before that calorie counts decreased the amount of calories people chose to consume, and that exercise equivalents (telling you how much walking time or walking distance you’d need to burn off those calories) increased the effect.

We’d like to know the effect size of (3) vs (4) and are awaiting a full copy of the paper.

ABSTRACT

In this study we examined the effect of physical activity based labels on the calorie content of meals selected from a sample fast food menu. Using a web-based survey, participants were randomly assigned to one of four menus which differed only in their labeling schemes (n = 802): (1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories. There was a significant difference in the mean number of calories ordered based on menu type (p = 0.02), with an average of 1020 calories ordered from a menu with no nutritional information, 927 calories ordered from a menu with only calorie information, 916 calories ordered from a menu with both calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, and 826 calories ordered from the menu with calorie information and the number of miles to walk to burn those calories. The menu with calories and the number of miles to walk to burn those calories appeared the most effective in influencing the selection of lower calorie meals (p = 0.0007) when compared to the menu with no nutritional information provided. The majority of participants (82%) reported a preference for physical activity based menu labels over labels with calorie information alone and no nutritional information. Whether these labels are effective in real-life scenarios remains to be tested.

REFERENCE
Sunaina Dowray, Jonas J. Swartz, Danielle Braxton, Anthony J. Viera
Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals ☆
Appetite, Volume 62, 1 March 2013, Pages 173–181
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2012.11.013

THE LUCID PERCEPTION OF THE CROWD

This is one of the most amazing things we’ve seen all week. What does the text block above say? You have no idea, right?

The folks running the Deneme blog over at MIT gave this task to experimental participants in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labor market. By doing it in an iterative way, people were able to transcribe the blurry mess to English with only one mistake.

The iterative method is as follows:

* One person gives the transcription a try
* The next person sees the previous tries and tries to improve upon it
* Repeat until done

(We’re not sure if the workers can see all the previous attempts or just the last one).

This is what the iterative method came up with:

I had intended to hit the nail, but I’m not a very good aim it seems and I ended up hitting my thumb. This is a common occurence I know, but it doesn’t make me feel any less ridiculous having done it myself. My new strategy will involve lightly tapping the nail while holding it until it is embedded into the wood enough that the wood itself is holding it straight and then I’ll remove my hand and pound carefully away. We’ll see how this goes.

…and the only error was that ’embedded’ should have been ‘wedged’.

Remarkably, for the passage above, people got it. And in a non-iterative version, in which each person had no help from previous workers, everyone gave up. Details are here. That said in two other texts, neither the iterative or non-iterative method worked, but of course they only tried once per text.

We are curious to know how they’ve improved upon this very promising method.

P.S. We’ve found this task to be slightly easier when you scroll the blurry text up and down a bit in the browser. Try it on the full sized image on the original blog post.

P.P.S. When you iterate but only look at the last attempt (instead of the original plus the last attempts) things get worse, as in the game of telephone. Check out this cool example of how a straight line morphs into craziness by error propagation.

P.P.P.S. I remember my dad, a psychology professor, showing me results of a line copying experiment he did on his students at Carnegie Mellon in the 1970s. He passed a deck of index cards around the class. Each student looked at the image on the top of the deck, moved it to the bottom, and tried to reproduce it on the blank card on top, and then passed it on. The results were similarly crazy.

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

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

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

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

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

Enjoy both!

Dan Goldstein
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

CALL FOR PAPERS

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

Submission Deadline: April 26, 2013

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

OVERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ORGANIZATION:

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

Program committee and invited speakers will be announced soon.

MPI SUMMER SCHOOL 2013: DECISION MAKING IN A SOCIAL WORLD. DUNCAN WATTS KEYNOTE

Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality

Decision Making in a Social World

This summer Gerd Gigerenzer and Ralph Hertwig will host the annual Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality, with a focus on “Decision Making in a Social World”.

Dr. Duncan Watts of Microsoft Research, author of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age”, will give the keynote address. This year marks the first time the event is jointly presented by the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition as well as the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Join renowned faculty and international participants across various disciplines for talks and workshops during the one-week Summer Institute. 35 young scholars will have the opportunity to explore how bounded rationality helps the navigation of the complex social world, as well as present their research and receive feedback from and network with distinguished researchers and fellow young scholars.

We invite talented graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to apply before April 10, 2013. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available at http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/adaptives-verhalten-und-kognition/summer-institute-on-bounded-rationality.

Questions are welcomed to summerinstitute2013@mpib-berlin.mpg.de.

Feel free to pass the information on to interested (and interesting) researchers.

HERE ARE YOUR ANSWERS

Last week we posted two fun probability problems. If you haven’t given them the old college try do so now, because this week we present you with the answer, provided by the man who supplied the problems, author and Professor of Operations Research and Probability Henk Tijms. Voila.

Enjoy this kind of thing? Try the Tuesday’s child is full of probability problems problem.

COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBABILITIES REDUX

Drawn in by our post Tuesday’s child is full of probability problems, author and Professor of Operations Research and Probability Henk Tijms writes in with two new puzzles:

Problem 1:

An isolated island is ruled by a dictator. Every family on the island has two children. Each child is equally likely a boy or a girl. The dictator has decreed that each first-born girl (if any) in the family should bear the name Mary Ann (the name of the beloved mother-in-law of the dictator). Two siblings never have the same name. You are told that a randomly chosen family that is unknown to you has a girl named Mary Ann. What is the probability that this family has two girls?

Problem 2:

The dictator has passed away. His son, a womanizer, has changed the rules. For each first-born girl in the family a name must be chosen at random from 10 specific names including the name Mary Ann, while for each second-born girl in the family a name must be randomly chosen from the remaining 9 names. What is now the probability that a randomly chosen family has two girls when you are told that this family has a girl named Mary Ann? Can you intuitively explain why this probability is not the same as the previous probability?

If you need a hint, he adds this postscript:

P.S. As you know, the wording in this kind of problems is crucial. I found that the best approach to attack this kind of problems is to use Bayes’ rule in odds form. This specific form of Bayes forces you to make transparent the assumption you are (implicitly) making in solving the problem. I take the liberty to mention that in the recent third edition of my book Understanding Probability (Cambridge University Press, 2012), I advocate the use of Bayes’ rule in odds form (and Bayesian thinking in general).

Who can solve it first?

EVERYDAY RISKY CHOICE

One question we get asked a lot is whether it’s worth it to pre-pay for the tank of gas when renting a car.

At first, blush it seems like something you should never do. In the best case, you pay market rate for gas, and in the worst case, you pay for a tank of gas you never consume (what if your trip gets cancelled)?

At second blush, it can be worth the risk to avoid the hassle of fueling up just before returning the car. If your time and peace of mind are worth something, then maybe you should pre-pay when you are reasonably sure you’ll return it below a certain percentage full. But what percentage?

To help with this decision, we’ve calculated the amount of money you waste when returning the car at various percentages full (above). We plugged in the New York City price of gas we face ($4) and the current national average ($3.56). For us, the hassle of refueling in the South Bronx after a weekend in the country is about $5, so we should probably pre-pay when we’re pretty sure we’ll return the car about 5-10% full.

We discussed this topic with Sid Suri and concluded that many factors go into this decision:

• Freedom from stress of having to fill up
• Stress of trying to run the tank down as low as possible without running out of gas (sure, it’s a commission of the sunk cost fallacy, but we’re humans)
• The thrill of returning the car right before it runs out of gas
• Time of day of return
• Cognitive costs of deciding how much gas to purchase during a trip so it’s nearly empty upon return
• Safety of gas station near return location
• Gas lines (we once pre-paid after Hurricane Sandy and avoided a several-hour long gas line)
• The “fee” for returning the car less than 100% full (something like $8 / gallon) vs. the expected loss by pre-paying

We think that:

• It would be much better if you could just pre-pay for a quarter tank instead of a tank. We’d even accept a small fee to do this.
• Most people who pre-pay are sticking it to their employers.

Graphs were made in R using Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package.

Code is here:

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
NYC=4
NAT=3.56
pl=seq(.05,.25,.05)
gal=pl*17
nycost=gal*NYC
natcost=gal*NAT
mdf=data.frame(
Percentage_full=c(pl,pl),
Cost=c(nycost,natcost),
Locale=c(rep("NYC",length(pl)),rep("US",length(pl))))
p=ggplot(mdf,aes(Percentage_full,Cost,group=Locale,
        color=Locale,shape=Locale))
p=p+geom_point(size=3)+geom_line()
p=p+scale_x_continuous("\nPercentage left in tank",limits=c(0,.3),
	labels=percent_format())
p=p+scale_y_continuous("Money Lost\n",limits=c(0,20),
        labels=dollar_format())
p=p+theme(legend.position="bottom")
p=p+ggtitle("The gamble of pre-paying for gas")
p