Decision Science News

INFORMATION THAT AIDS TRAVEL DECISION-MAKING

If you type the name of an airline and flight number into Google, it tells you the flight status information:

For example, if one types “jetblue 301”, one gets

Track status of B6 301 from Washington (IAD) to Fort Lauderdale (FLL)
24 Jun 2009 – On schedule
Departed: 8:02 AM, Estimated arrival: 10:32 AM

If one types “aa 59”, one gets:

Track status of AA 59 from New York (JFK) to San Francisco (SFO)
24 Jun 2009 – 28 minutes late
Departed: 8:06 AM, Estimated arrival: 10:46 AM

The flight stats information seems to be pulled from http://www.flightstats.com

Who loves you? Decision Science News does!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/396388128/

POSTDOC IN DECISION MAKING AT DUKE FUQUA SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

Since the job market for business school profs may be lousy this year, grad students might want to take note of this posdoctoral opportunity at Duke.

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business invites applications for a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of Behavioral Decision Making. The postdoctoral fellow will work with Dr. John Payne, Dr. Jim Bettman and Dr. Mary Frances Luce on work related to the impact of emotion on decision making. Planned projects include experimental laboratory research addressing the interaction of different forms and sources of emotion with features of decision task environments. Opportunities will exist to apply this research within medical and financial domains, depending in part on the interests of the applicant. Applicants should have training in experimental construction, design, and analysis as well as a high-quality, ongoing research stream. The position will provide opportunities to interact with faculty across the business school and allied departments at Duke University. Salary and teaching obligations are negotiable; the post doc will have access to health, dental and retirement benefits. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. If interested, please email CV to mluce@duke.edu.

2009 MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Boston, MA during November 21-23, 2009. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20. Hotel reservations at the $175 Psychonomic convention rate can be made by clicking here.Conference fees are yet to be determined. Last year’s fees were $330 for members ($170 for students). Fees this year are anticipated to be the same or (possibly) lower.

2009 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for symposia, oral presentations, and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required.

SUBMISSIONS: The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2009. 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, Craig McKenzie, at cmckenzie@ucsd.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 athttp://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, 2009. 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
Craig McKenzie (Chair), Alan Schwartz, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Melissa Finucane, Nathan Novemsky, Michel Regenwetter, Ulf Reips, Gal Zauberman, Dan Ariely (SJDM president), Julie Downs (Conference Coordinator).

THE PROS AND CONS OF TEACHING HEURISTICS FOR STATISTICS

All smart statisticians use rules of thumb. DSN has noticed that as soon as one statistician codifies or pronounces a rule of thumb, smart alecs come along with special cases that violates the rule thereby “proving” the rule and the person who articulated it “wrong”. (Smart alecs love to pretend that those who impart rules of thumb are so dumb as to believe that the rules work in all circumstances).

DSN has noticed that Intro Stats students are hungry for rules of thumb. For instance, they want rules relating the number of predictors to the number of observations in multiple regression. A quick search on the internet finds:

* observations should be at least 10-20 times the number of predictors.
* observations should be 6-10 times the number of predictors
* observations should be the number of predictors plus 104 (I’m not making this up … might be a typo)
* 30 observations for one predictor, then add 10 per predictor
* observations should be > predictors (duh)
* 10 observations per predictor but you can get by with fewer if pairwise correlation between predictors is low
* 10 – 15 observations per predictor

When students ask for a rule of thumb, should we give them one?
Should we not give the rule and explain the tradeoffs they are making?
Should we give the rule and the explanation both? This sounds ideal, but let’s face it, most intro stats students are likely to remember the rule and forget the explanation.

If we don’t impart the rule, we’re not teaching them the practices that we ourselves apply.
If we do, we’re setting them up for the attack of the smart alecs.

What to do?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boichat/281332467/

SURVEY RESULTS ON MARKETING PROFESSOR HIRING FOR THE 2010-2011 ACADEMIC YEAR

Decision Science News loves Marketing (the academic discipline). Chris Janiszewski and Geeta Menon have continued the wonderful tradition (previously carried out by Peter Dickson) of surveying the world’s marketing departments and finding out how many candidates are on the market, how many schools are hiring, etc. How cool is that? Read Janiszewski and Menon’s survey on the Marketing job market.

The not so wonderful news is that it isn’t a great year to be a job candidate, with a record-setting 3.35 rookies per position. DSN readers can improve their chances by reading Decision Science News’ advice for the marketing job market.

Thank you for participating in the 2009 Marketing Academia Labor Market Survey. We realize there is a lot of uncertainty in the market this year, so we are particularly grateful to you for having responded speedily to this survey to enable us to compile the data before June.

Attached is our summary of the results. Please forward this document to colleagues in your department, your recruiting committee, PhD program coordinators, any PhD students who are on the job market, and to anyone else you think may benefit from this information. Please note that we are only sending this report to one person in each school, so please distribute as you deem fit.

This was our first year conducting this survey; a huge debt of gratitude to Peter Dickson who conducted it for the past 17 years. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail either one of us.

Regards,

Chris Janiszewski & Geeta Menon

AN INTRO TO SMDM

This week, Alan Schwartz and Valerie Reyna provide a bit of information to Decision Science News readers, and people familiar with the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) about the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).

As a result of strengthening ties between the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Medical Decision Making, SJDM members with interests in decisions around health and health care are encouraged to attend (and submit presentations for) the SMDM annual meeting (for 2009, it’ll be at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Hollywood, CA, USA, October 18-21). This “travel guide” highlights some of the differences between the meetings that you should expect.

About SMDM and its meeting
The Society for Medical Decision Making’s mission is to better understand medical decision making, and to improve health outcomes through the advancement of proactive systematic approaches to clinical decision making and policy-formation in health care by providing a scholarly forum that connects and educates researchers, providers, policy-makers, and the public. Its members include physicians, economists, psychologists, decision analysts, and other decision researchers. Its annual meeting is one year older than SJDM. The two societies had about 50 members in common in 2008.

Meeting format – what’s similar?
Like the SJDM meeting, SMDM features poster sessions, concurrent oral presentation sessions with question and answer time, and symposia. There is a presidential address, a keynote address, an awards presentation, and a social event.

Meeting format – what’s different?
Both SMDM and its meeting are somewhat larger than SMDM. A typical SMDM meeting sees about 560 attendees to SJDM’s 490.

SMDM oral presentations are 15 minutes long (including questions), rather than SJDM’s 20 minutes. Presentation sessions are usually chaired by a society member who is not speaking in the session, and is
responsible for timekeeping.

The SMDM symposium differs from the SJDM symposium. In SMDM, a symposium is usually held as the only session in its time slot, and is organized by the symposium chairs for the meeting. Most often, the chairs seek external funding (e.g., from one of the National Institutes of Health) to support a panel of presenters around a focused theme. In this, they resemble panel-based keynotes.

SMDM also offers (at extra cost) an extensive set of half-day and full-day short courses during the day before the meeting. These courses feature instruction by experts in a variety of methodological and content areas and vary in the level of background required; it is common for senior SMDM members to take short courses as students. Although the catalog of short courses for 2009 is already fixed, SJDM members might enjoy developing and teaching a short course at a future meeting; if that interests you, it’s wise to take a course this year to get familiar with the format.

Cultural notes
Like SJDM, SMDM is considered a very friendly meeting, and encourages presentations by students and trainees as well as more senior researchers. The keen observer of scientific cultures will, however, find several intriguing differences between SJDM and SMDM which reflect the different traditions of social science and medical meetings:

SMDM presidential addresses traditionally tackle broad themes about the Society and its role in health care scholarship, policy, and education, unlike the traditionally data-heavy research talks based on the work of the president at SJDM.

SMDM has a higher registration fee ($410 for members and $560 for non-members in 2008) meeting elements are often supported by external funding. The hotels are often more expensive, concurrent oral sessions provide microphones for the audience, and laptops are provided by the hotel for presenters.
When asking a question of a presenter at SMDM, it is customary to go to the microphone, state your name and institution, and, if possible, offer some brief encouraging words about the value of the research before asking the question. You may also hear people begin their question with “I’m confused”, in tribute to founding (and still highly active) SMDM member Steve Pauker, for whom this has become a trademark phrase. The dress code at SMDM is, on average, slightly less casual. The SMDM social event often involves renting out a museum, aquarium, or other artistic or scientifically-oriented institution, and providing a catered reception with opportunities for discussion that conclude considerably earlier than SJDM’s typical post-midnight last round. (There have been notable exceptions, however, such as the 1997 Houston meeting’s rodeo event complete with barbeque and a cow-chip throwing contest). In 2009, to avoid Los Angeles traffic, the social event will take over the upscale bowling alley next door to the hotel.

Key phrases you may hear at the SMDM meeting

Time-tradeoff and standard gamble: Two common methods for assessing the health-related utility for a person in a given state of health. In time-tradeoff, respondents identify the indifference point between living their full life expectancy in an impaired health state and living a shorter life in perfect health. In standard gamble, respondents identify the indifference point between an impaired health state for sure and a gamble with some probability of perfect health, otherwise death.

Quality-adjusted life year (QALY): A common metric for evaluating the impacts of changing health states on health-related utility over a life time. One QALY is one year of life spent in perfect health (or two years spent in a health state assessed as having utility 0.5, etc.)

Cost-effectiveness analysis: A decision analysis which seeks to minimize the ratio between the cost of a strategy (e.g., a treatment program for a disease) and its health benefit (“effectiveness”), typically measured in $/QALY or €/QALY. Conventionally, interventions with ratios lower than $50,000-$100,000/QALY are deemed “cost-effective”.

The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS): A developing international set of criteria to determine the quality of patient decision aids, tools that attempt to improve decision quality by helping patients understand complex information and clarify their own preferences.

For more information about SMDM, including its call for papers, visit http://www.smdm.org

In 2009, there is also a special opportunity for three SJDM members to have travel supported to present their work in collaboration with SMDM members. This has a deadline of May 30, 2009; see http://decision.cybermango.org

OLDER AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS: EQUAL RESULTS, FEWER UNNECESSARY COMMANDS

Decision Science News recently had a birthday and took up an interest in age-related cognitive decline.

Some good news on this front comes from a recent study on air traffic controllers, which finds that while older controllers show the usual side-effects of aging, they make up for it with experience. The study, by Ashley Nunes and Arthur Kramer, also finds that older controllers get the same quality of results, while issuing fewer commands.

This makes us think about leadership. In leaders, we want people who get results while not issuing unnecessary orders.

DSN has wondered how to square the cognitive decline research with the fact that most leaders–the people to whom we defer our decision making–are up there in age. Many say that voters and businesses are incapable of making good decisions, but even if this were the case, humans do learn. The age disadvantage, if it existed, would likely be discovered by voters and corporate boards. Perhaps the preference for older leaders can be explained by 1) the quality of their decisions being equally good (or better) and 2) their more developed social networks helping them get elected.

To read more:

“Experience-Based Mitigation of Age-Related Performance Declines: Evidence From Air Traffic Control” Ashley Nunes, PhD, and Arthur F. Kramer, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 15, No. 1

http://www.apa.org/releases/air-traffic.html

Photo credit: noaa.gov

DOS OPORTUNIDADES DE EMPLEO

Los puentes

In honor of Cinco de Mayo, Decision Science News is adopting a Spanish language theme which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with the following postdocs.

Vamos a Basel:

The Economic Psychology Lab at the Department of Psychology of the University of Basel, Switzerland, is seeking applicants for a postdoctoral fellow position for a period of 2-3 years. The position can begin as soon as August 1st 2009, but later start dates are possible.

Candidates should be interested in studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human behavior. The ideal candidate will have completed his/ her graduate work and will have interest and experience in one or two of the following research areas: judgment and decision making, reinforcement learning, neuroeconomics, or consumer behavior. Competence in cognitive modeling and/or fMRI-research is desirable.

Applicants may be of any nationality, and the required teaching may be conducted in German or English. The Economic Psychology Lab is directed by Jörg Rieskamp. Please submit applications (consisting of a cover letter describing research interests, curriculum vitae, up to five reprints, and 2 letters of recommendation). Review of applications will start the 15th of May and continue until the position is filled. The preferred method of submission is a single PDF file for the cover letter and CV, plus PDF copies of the reprints e- mailed to joerg.rieskamp@unibas.ch . Referees should send letters of recommendation directly to the email address given above.

Y tu CMU también …

The Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory (DDMLab) (www.cmu.edu/ddmlab) in the department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) invites applications for Postdoctoral fellowship positions in social sciences and decision making.

Research projects require experience planning and conducting laboratory studies with dynamic simulations and decision making games. Fellows will be involved in a research project aiming at the study of cultural, political identities, and other socio-cognitive variables, and the way they influence conflict and its resolution, using a combination of social science and computational modeling methods. The ideal candidates will have a Ph.D. in Psychology, Decision Science or Human Factors, and should have broad research interests in all facets of dynamic decision making research.

Appointment will pay competitive rates based on background and experience. The position is scheduled to start September 1, 2009 and extend for one or up to two years.

Applicants should send curriculum vitae, statement of research skills and interests, relevant journal articles, and three reference letters. Electronic applications are encouraged. Please send electronic documents (Word, Pdf) to: coty@cmu.edu or forward paper documents to:

Dr. Cleotilde Gonzalez, Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Social and Decision Sciences Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave – Porter Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Carnegie Mellon is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. For more information on our Equal Employment/Affirmative Action Policy and our Statement of Assurance, go to: http://www.cmu.edu/policies/documents/SoA.html

¡Hasta la próxima semana!

TIMELY, LIVELY, AND CREATIVE

Decision Science News just received the new copy of Marketing Science in the mail and must confess, it is great.

Where to start:

• Timely: It kicks off with an editorial that connects the science of marketing to the financial crisis, addressing a topic that is on the mind of many readers. This really makes a difference, especially when one considers that the studies published in most journal articles are several years old.
• Lively: The lead article “Website Morphing” by Hauser, Urban, Liberali, & Braun is followed up by three commentaries and a rejoinder by the author. Discussion! Debate!
• Relevant: The commentaries are short and written by very bright people (Hal Varian of Google; John Gittins – Oxford statistican whose theory figures in the main article; and Andrew Gelman of Columbia). This helps elevate the Return On Sentences Read (ROSR for you metrics fans).
• Concise: In the Internet age, there’s no reason to have mammoth journal articles. Put the important stuff in the journal and the rest can reside in an arbitrarily-long online appendix. Marketing Science articles are short, leaving room for many articles, which increases the chances that something will appeal to you (common sense in the print media industry, but journals I read started to wake up to it around 2005).
• Creative: In this website’s opinion, there are too many articles that basically say “We’re going to identify a moderating condition of a theory (of any field other than marketing) through some clever experiments that use household products as stimuli. The climax will be a splendid crossover interaction”. Two kinds of papers I’d like to see more of are 1) “Here’s an important problem to which we offer a solution” and 2) “Here’s a new capability, which might just be able do X, which could really change the world. Let’s see if it is true.” These latter papers are creative. They lead to discoveries, things like conjoint analysis, radar, and the ability to search all the world’s online information in less than a second. Marketing Science is full of such papers, as is clear from their titles “Website Morphing”, “Limited Edition Products: When and When Not To Offer Them”, “Zooming In: Self-Emergence of Movements in New Product Growth”. If applied, exploratory, and discovery-oriented research is supposed to be bad, then Decision Science News doesn’t want to be good.

All of this gives DSN quant envy. Time to brush up on those differential equations ….

HOW WE THINK ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL DECISIONS

Decision Science researchers Elke Weber and Dave Krantz of Columbia University feature prominently in the recent New York Times article Why Isn’t The Brain Green?.

Excerpt:

Over the past few decades a great deal of research has addressed how we make decisions in financial settings or when confronted with choices having to do with health care and consumer products. A few years ago, a Columbia psychology professor named David H. Krantz teamed up with Elke Weber — who holds a chair at Columbia’s business school as well as an appointment in the school’s psychology department — to assemble an interdisciplinary group of economists, psychologists and anthropologists from around the world who would examine decision-making related to environmental issues. Aided by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal, in other words, isn’t so much to explore theories about how people relate to nature, which has been a longtime pursuit of some environmental psychologists and even academics like the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Rather, it is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.

The article features other decision researchers as well, including Baruch Fischhoff, Thaler, Sunstein, Michel Handgraaf, and Dave Hardisty. DSN would like to point out that whether or not the brain is green, the brain is responsible for green.