Decision Science News

CALL FOR PAPERS. DEADLINE 1 MAY 2019

Decision Science News is happy to announce it is the on the Organizing Committee of:

What: Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation
Site: https://sites.google.com/view/behavioralec/
When: June 28, 2019
Where: Phoenix, AZ, in conjunction with the 20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC ’19)

We solicit research contributions and participants for The 1st Workshop on Behavioral Economics and Computation, to be held in conjunction with the 20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC ’19). The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse subareas of EC, who are interested in the intersection of human economic behavior and computation, to share new results and to discuss future directions for behavioral research related to economics and computation. It will be a full-day workshop, and will feature invited speakers, contributed paper presentations and a panel discussion.

The gap between rationality-based analysis that assumes utility-maximizing agents and the actual human behavior in the real world has been well recognized in economics, psychology and other social sciences. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in conducting behavioral research across many of the sub-areas related to economics and computation to address this gap. In one direction, some of these studies leverage insights on human decision making from behavioral economics and social psychology literature to study economic and computational systems with human users. In the other direction, computational tools are used to study and gain insights on human behavior and a data-driven approach is sometimes used to learn behavior models from user-generated data.

The Behavioral EC workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, including but not limited to computer science, economics, psychology and sociology, to exchange ideas related to behavioral research in economics and computation. In addition to sharing new results, we hope the workshop will foster a lively discussion of future directions and methodologies for behavioral research related to economics and computation as well as fruitful cross-pollination of behavioral economics, cognitive psychology and computer science.

We welcome studies at the intersection of economic behavior and computation from a rich set of theoretical, experimental and empirical perspectives. The topics of interest for the workshop are behavioral research in all settings covered by EC, including but not limited to:

• Behavioral mechanism design and applied mechanism design
• Empirical studies of economic behavior
• Boundedly-rational models of economic decision making
• Model evaluation and selection based on behavioral data
• Online prediction markets, experiments, and crowdsourcing platforms
• Hybrid human-machine systems
• Models and experiments about social considerations (e.g. fairness) in decision making
• Methods for behavioral EC: information aggregation, probability elicitation, quality control

Submission Deadline
May 1, 2019, 11:59pm PDT.

Acceptance Notification
May 20, 2019

Submission Information
We will give priority to new (unpublished) research papers, but will also consider ongoing research and recently published papers that may be of interest to the workshop audience. For submissions of published papers, authors must clearly state the venue of publication. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, significance, originality, research contribution, and likelihood to catalyze discussion. The workshop will not have archival proceedings but will post accepted papers on the workshop website. Position papers and panel discussion proposals are also welcome. At least one author of each accepted paper will be expected to attend and present their findings at the workshop.

Submissions can be in any format and can be up to 18 pages long (plus a title page and excluding appendices that can be arbitrarily long). We recommend the format of the EC submissions. The limit of 18 pages on the main body is an upper bound, and papers can be significantly shorter.

Submissions should be uploaded to the submission server no later than May 1, 2019, 11:59pm PDT.

Organizing Committee
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Dan Goldstein, Microsoft Research
Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia
Shengwu Li, Harvard University
Gali Noti, Hebrew University

More Information
For more information or questions, visit the workshop website:
https://sites.google.com/view/behavioralec/
or email the organizing committee: behavioralec2019@easychair.org

APPLICATION DEADLINE: APRIL 12, 2019

Machine learning is impacting the business world and the business research community. The CMU Summer Workshop on Machine Learning is intended to introduce junior researchers to the cutting-edge machine learning methods and their applications in the marketing and information systems research, and open up common ground for future discussions among researchers who are using or wish to use machine learning methods in their research.

The format of the workshop is a combination of lecture-style sessions, hands-on tutorials (directed primarily at doctoral students) and panel presentations. The lecture-style sessions and hands-on tutorials will cover the following topics:

• Supervised Learning
• Unsupervised Learning
• Graphical Models
• Deep Learning
• Reinforcement Learning
• Text, Image, Audio, Video mining
• Bayesian Machine Learning
• Causal Inference

Who should participate: The workshop is primarily intended for Ph.D. students in Consumer Behavior, Information Systems, Quantitative Marketing, or related business disciplines. We also welcome junior faculty members with an interest in machine learning methods to participate in the workshop.

Student application deadline is April 12, 2019.  We will admit a total of 50 students; accepted applicants will be notified by April 20, 2019.  Submit student application.

If there are more than two students who apply from the same school, we may ask the school to rank the students. Due to limited slots, we guarantee top 2 will be accepted, but depending on demand others may or may not be accepted to the workshop. Priority may be given to ISMS members.

Registration deadline is April 26, 2019:  Ph.D. Students $50, Faculty $200.

All attendees must cover their own travel expenses and hotel costs. Meals during the workshop will be provided.

Conference Chairs: Yan Huang (CMU, yanhuang@andrew.cmu.edu) and Xiao Liu (NYU, xliu@stern.nyu.edu)

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

The quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter is available for download from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features announcements, conferences, jobs, and very little else.

Enjoy!
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

DEADLINE MARCH 31, 2019

In 2006, the European Association for Decision Making (www.eadm.eu) was pleased to announce the creation of the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award to honor the memory of our late colleague, Jane Beattie. The award is to be made every two years and is intended for researchers who have recently completed the first stages of their careers – defined operationally by those who are 5 to 10 years post-PhD (see below).

The award is bestowed in recognition of “innovation in decision research”, as broadly understood within the Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM) tradition. In practical terms, this means that candidates should submit to the committee (a) a statement of 1,000 words or less that makes the case for their innovation; (b) one paper in which the innovation is presented for a scientific audience; and (c) a copy of their curriculum vitae. Candidates should also provide a statement as to when, and from where they received their PhDs.

The winner will receive a prize of 1,000 EUR, a certificate, and be asked to make a presentation at SPUDM 2019 in Amsterdam (www.spudm2019.com).

To be eligible for this award, candidates must have completed their PhDs no sooner than 5 years before the end of the most recent SPUDM meeting and no more than 10 years before the same date. Thus, to be eligible for the seventh award that will be presented at SPUDM in August 2019, candidates should have received their PhDs between August 2007 and August 2012.

The papers will be evaluated by a committee appointed by the Board of EADM consisting of Andreas Glöckner (University of Cologne, chair), Mehdi Moussaid (MPI Berlin, previous award winner), Arndt Bröder (University of Mannheim), Peter Ayton (University of London), and Cilia Witteman (Radboud University Nijmegen). To be considered for this award, papers and statements should be submitted before March 31, 2019 to: andreas.gloeckner@uni-koeln.de

TEST YOUR ESTIMATION SKILLS

Click to enlarge

Suppose you are looking at the roughly normally distributed data above and you want to visually estimate the standard deviation.

What would you guess? 20? 35?

How would you do it?

In a past post we talked about tips for drawing a normal distribution.

In it, we noted that if you follow a normal curve to 5/8ths of the height of the bell, you’ll be at the ± 1 standard deviation marks.

So just measure up 5/8ths (we’ve drawn gridlines to make that easy), drop a line down to the x-axis and read off the standard deviation (making a small adjustment if it’s not 0 centered).

Click to enlarge

If you don’t like estimating 5/8ths, you can also try to identify the inflection point in the bell curve: the place where it goes from bending down to bending up. That occurs at exactly ± 1 standard deviations.

Applying those heuristics here, we’d estimate the standard deviation on this chart to be about 25 … and it is 25!

Another way to do this is to identify the range that encompasses about 99% of the data and divide by 6. Here the measurements run from -80 to 80 or about 160 units. This divided by 6 is 26.67.

Not too bad!

R CODE TO REPRODUCE CHARTS

KNOW THY INFLECTION POINT

Click to Enlarge

We have drawn a lot of sorry-looking normal distributions in our life. It’s a shape that’s hard to get down without a lot of practice.

Here’s a few tips that can make it easier.

• Start by marking out standard deviations on the x axis from -3 to +3
• At x=0, draw a point to be the top of the bell curve
• At ± 1 SDs draw points at about 5/8ths of the height
• At ± 2 SDs draw points at about 1/8th of the height
• At ± 3.25 SDs draw points on the X axis

Now, to get the bends right, we exploit the following cool fact: There is an inflection point at ±1 standard deviation. That is,

At 1 standard deviation, the curve stops bending down and starts bending up.

Draw through those points and voila, normal distribution!

You might be wondering if these tips are approximations or exact. The heights of the points are approximate but within 1-2% of the exact values. The inflection point at ± 1 SD is real. That’s right, the second derivative is 0 at exactly ± 1 standard deviation.

RELATED BUT DIFFERENT DSN POST
How to eyeball a standard deviation

R CODE FOR THE PLOTS

SUBMISSION DEADLINE 18 APRIL 2019

The 2019 IAREP/SABE conference on Economic Psychology and Behavioural Economics in Dublin, Ireland. The conference will be held on 1st-4th September, 2019.

You are invited to submit your extended abstract (max 1000 words) or full paper before April 18, 2019.

You can find the call for papers here: https://iarep.ucd.ie/call-for-papers/

You can find the conference website here: https://iarep.ucd.ie/

APPLICATION DEADLINE MARCH 31, 2019

The University of Pennsylvania, Social and Behavioral Science Initiative (SBSI) seeks applicants for a postdoctoral fellowship position for the 2019/2020 academic year. Funding is guaranteed for one year with the possibility of renewal for an additional year.

SBSI is a new interdisciplinary initiative comprised of scholars within the School of Arts and Sciences interested in the study of human social behavior and decision making.

The position is designed for individuals who have recently obtained a PhD degree in psychology or a related behavioral science discipline. The position is intended as a springboard for excellent researchers to help them build and establish their own research program. We are particularly interested in applicants who will pursue collaborative research with more than one SBSI scholar.

Applicants should specify in their research statement how their work connects with the interests of faculty in the SBSI. SBSI faculty are located primarily in the psychology department, but also in SAS departments that share an interest in human behavior and decision making, including communication, criminology, linguistics, philosophy, and political science. Topics of interest of faculty include judgement and decision-making, morality and cooperation, social cognition and evolutionary and cultural origins of behavior.

Benefits

Fellows receive a competitive salary and health insurance plus a modest research and travel budget. Fellows also benefit from access to the greater community of academics and leading research facilities equipped with cutting-edge instrumentation all on an urban campus in a vibrant city. Fellows are invited to join regular working group meetings within their field, plus career development workshops aimed at young researchers. Funding is guaranteed for one year with the possibility of renewal for an additional year.

Eligibility & Application

Applicants must have formally completed all requirements of the PhD. Candidates must submit a research statement that identifies potential collaborative opportunities with SBSI faculty at Penn, along with a CV, and contact information for two referees by March 31, 2019.

All eligible and complete applications will be evaluated by the Selection Committee and judged based on scientific excellence and fit.

Please direct applications and questions to: stonerl@sas.upenn.edu

Penn adheres to a policy that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected class. Background check required after a conditional job offer is made. Consideration of the background check will be tailored to the requirements of the job.

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEB 10, 2019

Call for Papers

IC2S2 brings together researchers in computational science, complexity, and social science, and provides a platform for new work in the field of computational social science.
Contributed abstracts are presented orally in parallel thematic sessions or as posters at the three day conference, which takes place at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands from July 18 to 20.

Regular abstract submission

IC2S2 solicits abstracts from researchers in the social sciences with a clear component of computation, simulation or data analysis or data science. This includes for example sociology, psychology, communication science, anthropology, media studies, political science, public health, and economics. In addition, contributions from computer science, data science, and computational science with real-world applications in the social sciences or related fields, are welcome. We emphatically welcome abstracts that try to integrate both components. This is not limited to empirical studies; more general theoretical contributions are also welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Network analysis of social systems
• Large-scale social experiments
• Agent-based or other simulations of social phenomena
• Text analysis and natural language processing (NLP) of social phenomena
• Cultural patterns and dynamics
• Computational science studies (sociology of science)
• Social news curation and collaborative filtering
• Social media studies
• Theoretical discussions in computational social science
• Causal inference and computational methods for social science
• Ethics in computational social sciences
• Reproducibility in computational social science
• Large scale infrastructure in computational social science
• Novel digital data sources
• Computational analyses for addressing societal challenges
• Methods and analyses of observational social data
• Computational social science research in industry

Submission guidelines

Contributions to the conference should be submitted via EasyChair at:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ic2s2-2019

Please follow the extended abstract template guidelines for Word (ic2s2-word-template.docx) and LaTeX (ic2s2-latex-template.zip) for formatting instructions. Note that abstracts should be submitted as a PDF file no larger than 20MB. Submissions that exceed the 2-page limit (including figures and references) will be automatically rejected.

The extended abstract should include a title and a list of 5 keywords, but no authors’ names or affiliations. The abstract should outline the main contribution, data and methods used, results, and the impact of the work. Authors are encouraged to include one figure in their submission (the figure counts towards the page limit).

Please do not include authors’ names and affiliations in the submitted document, as peer review will be double blind. Each extended abstract will be reviewed by multiple members of the Program Committee, composed of experts in computational social science.

When submitting on EasyChair you will be asked to provide information about the authors and their affiliations and to include a one-sentence summary of the extended abstract (20-50 words). The summary will be used for assigning reviewers. You can indicate a preference for an oral presentation or a poster presentation, but your preference may not be honored in the final decision.

Submissions will be non-archival, and the presented work can be already published, in preparation for publication elsewhere, or ongoing research. Submission implies willingness to present a talk or poster at the conference.

Deadline: February 10, 2019

Submit here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ic2s2-2019

Already uploaded submissions can be improved and updated as long as the deadline has not yet passed.

Questions or remarks regarding the CfP and submission process? Reach out to the program chairs at ic2s2-2019@easychair.org.

BUT NOT BY BAYES

The most important formula in data science was first used to prove the existence of God by Dan Kopf

Richard Price, Bayes’ theorem, and God by Martyn Hooper

Who is Richard Price? According to our former Prof Stephen Stigler “Roughly half of Bayes’s famous essay was written by Richard Price, including the Appendix with all of the numerical examples.”

Richard Price, the First Bayesian by Stephen Stigler

It is important to note what Chris Wiggins points out

In reviewing the history of Bayes’s theorem and theology, one might wonder what Reverend Bayes had to say about this, and whether Bayes introduced his theorem as part of a similar argument for the existence of God. But the good reverend said nothing on the subject, and his theorem was introduced posthumously as part of his solution to predicting the probability of an event given specific conditions. In fact, while there is plenty of material on lotteries and hyperbolic logarithms, there is no mention of God in Bayes’s “Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” presented after his death to the Royal Society of London in 1763

That is, people have used Bayes Theorem to argue for the existence of God, buy Reverend Bayes was not one of them.