Decision Science News

A TALE OF TWO SELVES

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It’s a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present. On Sunday, future self might want to go to bed early on Thursday, wake up early on Friday, and hit the gym where it will listen to one hour of “Listen-and-repeat Italian” lessons while mastering the StairMaster.

However, come Thursday evening’s dinner with a client, this voice cannot be heard next to that of present self saying yes to dessert, coffee, after-dinner liquer, and a postprandial visit to the pub. Sunday’s voice is also asleep Friday morning, when the present self resets the alarm from 5:30 to 8:00.

In a clever April fools joke, the website www.thinkgeek.com proposed a solution in the form of an alarm clock that donates money to your most-hated cause should you hit the snooze button. Imagine giving money to a despised politician every time you slept in. Might that get you out of bed?

While the SnuzNLuz alarm clock was a joke, it was a brilliant one. I believe that someone will run with this or a very similar idea. Many future selves find their present selves to be their own worst enemies, and might be willing to pay obedience school tuition. In fact, the much-buzzed about www.stickk.com is built on this model: taxing yourself for failing to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.

I am reminded of the time I was a postdoc at Columbia University, on the job market, and deep in a publish-or-perish the phase of my career. I instituted a similar (though lower-tech) mechanism. My rule was that if I didn’t write a certain number of pages each day, I would lose five dollars. I think I lost about $60 on the scheme, though it did land me a job I love.

I remember being seriously conflicted about whom to give the money to if I procrastinated. I felt that if I gave it to a good cause, I would be continually justifying my procrastination as charitable. I felt that if I gave it to a bad cause, that would be evil. I also feared that I would start justifying my procrastination by telling myself the bad cause isn’t so bad. (Sound far-fetched? The idea that we might infer our preferences from our actions is a key, if not field-defining, idea from social psychology.)

In the end, I chose to leave the money on a seat on the New York subway. Maybe a good person would find it, maybe a bad person would find it, all I was certain of was regretting my procrastination. Given that you’re not evil, if you found $5 on the 1/9 train around 2005, I hope that it inched you closer to your goals.

OPTIMAL SHOULDER STANDING

Decision Science News has long been influenced by Phil Greenspun’s observations, such as this one:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

which is known as Greenspun’s Tenth Rule. Trivia buffs will know that there weren’t 9 before it.  For those who aren’t programming nerds, this rule contains elements of: don’t reinvent the wheel, use the right tool for the job, and stand on the shoulders of giants, plus a hint of “my favourite programming language is better than yours”.

While doing some research on consumers’ (in)ability to detect differences between products, we came across a 1987 Greenspun & Klotz paper “Audio Analysis VI: Testing Audio Cables”. The authors are engineers who put participants to a single-blind test of sound quality transmitted through high and low quality audio cables.  (They found that people can tell two cables apart, but that the expensive cable was preferred only 15 times out of 28.) This seems to be straight-ahead experimental psych, so we were a little surprised when the authors, instead of reporting basic significance tests chose to rederive and compute them from scratch (in Common Lisp, of course) and document the story in a two-page appendix. Perhaps it was the Common Lisp that reminded us of it, but we couldn’t help drop Greenspun a line and ask:

From: Dan Goldstein
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2008

Dear Phil,
[…]
I wonder if you violated the spirit of your 10th law in your 1987 Computer Music Journal article by coding, and describing in a two-page appendix, what could have been replaced by reporting a simple significance test. Such tests are pre-coded in every stats package and in the back of every stats book. This is not a criticism, I’m just wondering why you went to all the trouble.

We were amazed and delighted to get a reply:

From: Philip Greenspun
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008

Several issues…

1) most of the readers are not stats experts

2) stats books are virtually impossible to understand (I tried a bunch
and gave up, even though I was an undergrad math major!)

3) I was able to explain what I was doing using simple probability
laws that most of the readers would have understood, sharing some
insights from Al Drake, a great probability teacher in the MIT EECS
department

So many people use stats tests and don’t understand them.

We see where Phil is coming from, but wonder if he isn’t being a bit hard on statistics.

INTERVIEW WITH BRUNO FREY, PART II

Here we continue last week’s Bruno Frey interview that Lionel Page and Dan Goldstein conducted before Frey’s Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making presentation at London Business School.

Lionel Page – I was thinking of what you said before about the negative effect of the Nobel prize. What do you think is the effect of tenure? I was wondering if there is maybe a negative of tenure. Is there evidence of this kind of thing?

Bruno Frey – I rather like this long period in which one learns the trade of one’s profession. One is socialized to the profession and then one gets tenure. In principle, I would argue that this should be the end of evaluations. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. I am fighting against evaluations. I think when people are well trained, afterwards one should leave them and tell them “ok, go ahead and work”. You would have a larger variance (you would have some that wouldn’t work any more, I perfectly admit that) but the others are then free to do what they like and can do long-run and different things. If you look at my research topics, where would I get approval? What group of economists would approve when I say I want to work on World Heritage? They say, he is crazy. When I say I want to work on awards or on orders, they would say “oh that’s crazy”. On happiness, “crazy, happiness doesn’t exist” etc., etc. I say one must give things a little bit of time to develop.

Dan Goldstein – Is it fair to say your productivity has much to do with the fact that you’re investigating pretty much just whatever it is you want to investigate?

BF – I am still one of those professors who is totally free to do what he wants. I do not have to get funds to do research. I am paid as a professor. I have some co-workers with whom I do the research, but I can decide on my own. Of course with my young collaborators, if they were are not interested, it wouldn’t work at all, but I don’t have to attract funds from outside and try to explain myself. How can I explain, in a new field, what will come out?

DG – Of course, where incentives are concerned, you have the freedom to do nothing if you want …

BF – Yes, but I believe in intrinsic motivation, that essentially good scientists, good scholars are intrinsically motivated. They will work because they like to work.

I couldn’t get interested in a lot of subjects that economists do, especially when I know it’s more or less dry and irrelevant. You know, I just wouldn’t like to work on general equilibrium analysis. And I am probably very bad at it. So, I always try to find new topics. Afterwards, the Americans come with their brilliant educations and the English with their brilliant educations, and of course are better. Or let’s say they are certainly better trained to do the things. So, I have to try to be a little bit original.

BRUNO FREY INTERVIEW, PART I

A few weeks ago, Lionel Page and your Decision Science News editor had Bruno Frey come to speak at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making series in London. Realizing that it is not every day someone of such stature comes to town, we decided to profiter (as French people such as Lionel say) and interview the man.

Dan Goldstein – You have been incredibly productive in your career, someone with 600 publications of various kinds and 18 books. You got your habilitation in 1969. So I’m just wondering, what are some of your secrets for being able to produce so much? When do you write? What do you not do that other people are doing? We all have the same number of hours in a year.

Bruno Frey – I think first of all I like to write, I like to do research. I like to find new topics. I walk through life always seeing things which might interest me. It might take a long time until something concrete comes out. Then I make my first sketch of what would be a problem. It takes months and months and when I fly or take the train, I keep thinking about it.

I do various things at the same time. So for instance now, the very newest thing I am working on is World Heritage. Who comes on the list? What site comes on the list? Is it perhaps unproductive to do that? All the funds go into the monuments on the list and it is possible the rest of culture loses. That’s one of the questions.

I also worked on the assassination of politicians. That’s an interesting topic too and almost no economists have worked on that. I mean physical assassination. One kind of assassination is physical–in some languages we call it Attentat, but the word doesn’t exist in English, but I want to introduce it. In English you always have to say an attempted or successful assassination and I want to cover both. I want to find the determinants of who is attacked, and the corresponding effort to protect.

I also do research on awards: orders and decorations and things like that. In England it’s of course very, very important, but in America, too. Americans have a huge amount of awards, you know The Best Teacher of the University or the month. Its incredible how it’s exploded.

DG – What do you think about the effect of the Nobel Prize on the field of Economics?

BF – On the individuals it’s rather negative. Afterwards, they’re no longer so productive …

Lionel Page – Is there evidence of that?

BF – Yes, yes, yes, there is some evidence of course, people differ but on average and there is a very nice paper on managers who were appointed Managers of the Year. Afterwards they performed much worse, because they want to write a book and do all kinds of things not related to their firm. So I look at awards, they are one of the incentives besides monitoring incentives. Then of course I try to do research on happiness.

DG – My question about the Nobel was about the field of Economics. So Economics is undeniably a very successful field. You go to almost every University, they’ll have an economics department, or whereas a less successful fields often lack departments. Economics faculty tend to be well paid. Universities seem to put a lot of resources in to get the best economists because it’s a signal of the overall quality of the university. A neighbouring field like Sociology may not get the same kind of respect. Do you think that has anything to do with the Nobel, or do you think it’s just about the importance of Economics as a subject?

BF – No, it has to do with the Nobel, and that is very funny story, why the Nobel is being awarded to economists and why not to sociologists. I think it was more or less one or two persons, and after all it’s financed by the Central Bank. Of course economists have a closer connection to the Central Bank people in Sweden than the Sociologists do.

I think it has raised the prestige of economics tremendously. I do not think that it has to do with the importance of economics as a discipline, because I am afraid we have problems there, but my discipline does not want to see the problem. It is the case that professional economists at universities and business schools are no longer very much in the centre of political debate. A Keynes or a Lord Robbins, etc., they were in the centre. Of course there are still some exceptions, but in general now economists working in banks (or finance people working in banks) are asked “what is the interest rate likely to be in the next month”, “how is inflation going,” etc.?

To be continued

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMA INTERVIEWS (2008 edition)

PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics are now gearing up to get their “packets” ready to mail out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
I’ve seen the Marketing job market turn happy grad students into quivering masses of fear. I want to share experiences that I and others have contributed, and provide a bit advice to make the whole process less mysterious.

WHAT DO I KNOW?
I’ve been on the AMA job market twice and the Psychology market once. As a professor I’ve conducted 20 AMA interviews and contributed to hiring decisions. I’ve been on the candidate of about 40 AMA interviews, as well as numerous campus visits, face-to-face interviews, offers, and rejections. I’m an outsider to Marketing who went on the market older and with more experience than the average rookie (35 years of age, with 8 years of research scientist, postdoc, visiting scholar, and industry positions). I’ve hired many people for many academic posts, so I know both sides.

HOW TO GET INTO THE AMA JOB MARKET
First, at least a couple months before the conference, find where it will be. It’s called the Summer Educator’s Conference. Strange name, I know. Get yourself a room in the conference hotel, preferably on the floor where the express elevator meets the local elevator for the upper floors. You’ll be hanging out on this floor waiting to change elevators anyway, so you might as well start there.

Next, get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA. It helps if this person is in Marketing. Get 1 or 2 other letters of recommendation, a CV, and some choice pubs. Put them in an envelope and mail them out to a friend of your sponsor at the desired school. It should look like the letter is coming from your sponsor, even though you are doing the actual assembly and mailing. Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized. Certainly send one to the recruiting coordinator (they may send letters to your department’s secretary telling you they are hiring) and one to your sponsor’s friend. Mail to schools regardless of whether they are advertising a position or not. This is academia: nobody knows anything. This means you may be sending 50 or more packets. You want to have them mailed by the 4^th of July at the absolute latest.

THEN WHAT?
Wait to get calls or emails from schools wishing to set up AMA interviews with you. These calls may come in as late as one week before the conference. Some schools will not invite you for totally unknown reasons. You may get interviews from the top 10 schools and rejected from the 30th-ranked one. Don’t sweat it. Again, this is the land of total and absolute unpredictability that you’re entering into. Also, know that just because you get an interview doesn’t mean they have a job. Sometimes schools don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have funding for a post. Still, you’ll want to meet with them anyway. After the AMA, you’ll hopefully get “fly-outs,” that is, offers to come and visit the campus and give a talk. This means you’ve made the top five or so. Most offers go down in December. There’s a second market that happens after all the schools realize they’ve made offers to the same person. Of course, some schools get wise to this and don’t make offers to amazing people who would have come. We need some kind of market mechanism to work out this part of the system.

THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP” RULE
Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that he or she will not be your colleague in the future. Therefore, think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend. You’ll need friends to collaborate, to get tenure, get grants, and to go on the market again if you’re not happy with what you get.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IN WHICH ROOM TO INTERVIEW?
The schools will leave messages for you telling you in which rooms your interviews will be. You’ll get calls, emails, and notes held for you at the hotel reception. Some schools will fail to get in touch with you so you have to try to find them. Many profs ask the hotel to make their room number public, but for some reason many hotel operators will still not give you the room number. Naturally having a laptop and internet connection allows for emailing of room numbers. Try to take care of this early on the first day.

HOW TO TREAT YOURSELF WHILE THERE
My sponsor gave me the advice of not going out at night and getting room service for breakfast and dinner. This worked for me. Also, the ridiculously high price of a room-service breakfast made me feel like I was sparing no expense, which I found strangely motivating.

HOW DO THE ACTUAL AMA INTERVIEWS GO?
At the pre-arranged time you will knock on their hotel room door. You will be let into a suite (p=.4) or a normal hotel room (p=.5, but see below). In the latter case, there will be professors with long and illustrious titles—people you once imagined as dignified—sitting on beds in their socks. The other people in the room may not look at you when you walk in because they will be looking for a precious few seconds at your CV. For at least some people in the room, this may be the first time they have concentrated on your CV. Yikes is right. Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.

THE SEAT OF HONOR
There will be one armchair in the room. Someone will motion towards the armchair, smile, and say, “You get the seat of honor!” This will happen at every school, at every interview, for three days. I promise.

THE TIME COURSE
There will be two minutes of pleasant chit-chat. They will propose that you talk first and they talk next. There will be a little table next to the chair on which you will put your flip book of slides. You will present for 30 minutes, taking their questions as they come. They will be very nice. When done, they will ask you if you have anything to ask them. You of course do not. You hate this question. You make something up. Don’t worry, they too have a spiel, and all you need to do is find a way to get them started on it. By the time they are done, it’s time for you to leave. The whole experience will feel like it went rather well.

PREDICTING IF YOU WILL GET A FLY-OUT
It’s impossible to tell from how it seems to have gone whether they will give you a fly-out or not. Again, this is the land of staggering and high-impact uncertainty. They might not invite you because you were too bad (and they don’t want you), or because you were too good (and they think they don’t stand a chance of getting you).

DO INTERVIEWS DEVIATE FROM THAT MODEL?
Yes.

Sometimes instead of a hotel room, they will have a private meeting room (p=.075). Sometimes they will have a private meeting room with fruit, coffee, and bottled water (p=.025). Sometimes, they will fall asleep while you are speaking (p=.05). Sometimes they will be rude to you (p=.025). Sometimes a key person will miss an early interview due to a hangover (p=.025). Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day, they will drink alcohol with you (p=.18, given that it’s the end of the day).

HOW YOU THINK THE PROCESS WORKS
The committee has read your CV and cover letter and looked at your pubs. They know your topic and can instantly appreciate that what you are doing is important. They know the value of each journal you have published in and each prize you’ve won. They know your advisor and the strengths she or he instills into each student. They ignore what they’re supposed to ignore and assume everything they’re supposed to assume. They’ll attach a small weight to the interview and fly you out based on your record.

HOW THE PROCESS REALLY WORKS
The interviewers will have looked at your CV for about one minute a couple months ago, and for a few seconds as you walked in the room. They will never have read your entire cover letter, and they will have forgotten most of what they did read. They could care less about your advisor and will get offended that you didn’t cite their advisor. They’ll pay attention to everything they’re supposed to ignore and assume nothing except what you repeat five times. Flouting 50 years of research in judgment and decision-making, they’ll attach a small weight to your CV and fly you out based on your interview.

Your ability to speak English well won’t get you a good job, but your inability to do so will eliminate you from consideration at every top school. Understand that business schools put a premium on teaching. If the interviewers don’t think you can communicate in the classroom, they’re probably not going to take a chance on you. If you are just starting out and your spoken English is shaky, my advice is to work on it as hard as you are working on anything else.

TWO WAYS TO GIVE YOUR SPIEL
1) The plow. You start and the first slide and go through them until the last slide. Stop when interrupted and get back on track.

2) The volley. Keep the slides closed and just talk with the people about your topic. Get them to converse with you, to ask you questions, to ask for clarifications. When you need to show them something, open up the presentation and show them just that slide.

I did the plow the first year and the volley the second year. I got four times more fly-outs the second year. Econometricians are now trying to determine if there was causality.

HOW TO ACT
Make no mistake, you are an actor auditioning for a part. There will be no energy in the room when you arrive. You have to bring the energy into the room with you. The interviewers are tired. They’ve been listening to people in a stuffy hotel room from dawn till dusk for days. If you do an average job, you lose: You have to be two standard deviations above the mean to get a fly-out. So audition for the part, and make yourself stand out. If you want to learn how actors audition, read Audition by Michael Shurtleff.

SOCIAL SKILLS MATTER
From the candidate’s point of view, everything is about the CV and the correctness of the mathematical proofs in the job market paper. However, for better or for worse, extra-academic qualities matter. Here are two examples. 1) The Social Lubricant factor. Departments get visitors all the time: guest speakers, visiting professors, job candidates, etc. Some departments are a bunch of folks who stare at their shoes when introduced to a new person. These departments have a real problem: they have nobody on board who can make visitors feel at ease, and sooner or later word starts to spread about how socially awkward the people at University X are. To fix such problems, departments sometimes hire socially-skilled types who know how to make people comfortable in conversation, and who know how to ask good questions during talks. Also, interviewers assume (probably incorrectly) that people who can talk a good game will be star teachers. 2) The Soft Sell factor. Many people succeed in academia not because they are often right, but also because they are masters of making other people feel like they aren’t wrong. Defensiveness or determination to embarrass when responding to critique is a sure way to blow an interview.

HAVE A QUIRK
One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you. My quirk is that I worked internationally as a theater director for over 10 years. It’s got nothing to do my research, but I can’t tell you the number of people who bring up this odd little fact when I do campus visits.

DON’T GIVE UP
Never think it’s hopeless. Just because you’re not two SDs above the mean at the school of your dreams, doesn’t mean you’re not the dream candidate of another perfectly good school.

Many candidates don’t realize the following: The students are competing for schools and the schools are competing for students. If you strike out, you can just try again next year. I know a person in Psychology who got 70 rejections in one year. I know a person in Marketing who was told he didn’t place in the top 60 candidates at the 20th ranked school. The subsequent year, both people got hired by top 5 departments. One of them is ridiculously famous!

RUMORS
Don’t gossip. All gossip can mess with your chances. Gossip that you are doing well can hurt you because schools will be afraid to invite you if they think you won’t come. Gossip that you are doing poorly can hurt you because schools that like you will be afraid to invite you if they think no one else does. Sometimes people will ask a prof at your school if you would come to their school, and the prof will then ask you. To heck with that. Just say that if they want to talk to you, they should deal with you directly.

The danger of rumors can be summed up by the following story. At ACR in 2003, I was having a beer with someone who confessed, “you know, my friend X at school Y told me that they want to hire you, but they’re afraid your wife won’t move to Z”. I was single.

ADDENDUM
Have your own advice to add? Want more detail on specific parts of the process? Let me know. dan at dangoldstein dot com.

MARKETING / POLITICS JOBS FOR APPLIED DECISION TYPES

Position: Senior Market Segmentation Specialist
Company: CA, Inc.
Location: Framingham, MA, Midtown Manhattan or Islandia, Long Island
Salary: $90-$110K + full-time benefits
Contact: Please email resume to dominique.goldstein at ca.com
CA, (NYSE: CA), one of the world’s leading independent, enterprise management software companies, unifies and simplifies complex information technology (IT) management across the enterprise for greater business results.

Job Overview
The Senior Market Segmentation Specialist develops and leads segmentation, market research, and market analysis projects. He/she engages heavily with other groups within CA to assist in business planning, market understanding, customer targeting and campaign planning. These groups include the business units, field marketing, executive management and other corporate marketing groups. This position involves providing actionable insights based on largely quantitative analysis.

Key Responsibilities

Preferred Education

Work Experience

Specific Skills and Certifications

Position-Specific Authorities

Jobs at the Analyst Institute

The Analyst Institute assists organizations in building testing into their voter contact efforts, and is a clearinghouse for evidence-based best practices in progressive voter contact.

We have four functions. First, we serve as a clearinghouse for evidence-based best practices in voter contact. Second, we directly assist organizations involved in on-going research, especially when that research addresses topics of wide interest. Third, we ensure that the highest research priorities are pursued in the present election cycle. And fourth, we facilitate data analysts and related professionals in sharing and collaborating.

Contact: Cover letter and resume to Jobs@analystinstitute.org

SENIOR ANALYST

Responsibilities
The Senior Analyst(s) will work closely with partner organizations in designing, executing, and analyzing their voter contact evaluations. These evaluations will usually involve randomized field experiments designed in the spring and implemented in the summer and fall. Any given study will likely involve membership recruitment, voter registration, voter persuasion, and/or get-out-the-vote efforts.

This person must have experience with field research, be self-motivated, and thrive in a dynamic start-up environment. This person may work as a part-time consultant or as a full-time employee of the Analyst Institute.

Qualifications

• Experience with field research, especially field experiments.
• Detail oriented and highly organized.
• Experience working on, or with political campaigns.
• Ability to work well under tight deadlines.
• Excellent verbal and written skills.
• Understanding of statistics and the methodology of political experiments and measurement.
• PhD or MA in social science.

Start Date: Flexible, ASAP
Location: Washington DC, McPherson Square
Deadline: 4/11
Analyst Institute is an equal opportunity employer. Salary is commensurate with experience.

ANALYST

Responsibilities
Analyst(s) will work closely with others in the Analyst Institute. Analyst(s) will be involved in a wide range of activities including managing voter files, editing documents and presentations, cleaning and evaluating experimental data, and working with partner organizations in executing and analyzing their voter contact evaluations. The Analyst Institute’s research will usually be randomized field experiments involving membership recruitment, voter registration, voter persuasion, and/or get-out-the-vote efforts.

This person must have a background in a quantitative field (computer science, mathematics, statistics, econometrics, etc.), be self-motivated, and thrive in a dynamic start-up environment. Experience with field research and/or political campaigns is a plus.

Qualifications

• Comfortable with statistics software (SPSS, Stata, Excel, R, etc.)
• Detail oriented and highly organized.
• Ability to work well under tight deadlines.
• Excellent analytical skills.
• Able to learn quickly, and able to develop skills as needed.
• Basic understanding of methodology of political experiments and measurement.

Start Date: Flexible, ASAP
Location: Washington DC, McPherson Square
Salary: Commensurate with experience
Deadline: 4/11

** DSN FLASH**
Bounded Rationality Summer School deadline extended till April 7th
***

POSTDOCS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE/REASONING ON THE SEMANTIC WEB

The Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, under the direction of Gerd Gigerenzer, is seeking applicants for postdoctoral fellow positions for a period of 3 years. All positions can begin as soon as May 1st 2008, but later or earlier start dates are possible.

Candidates should be interested in studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying bounded, social, and ecological rationality in real-world domains. Current and past researchers in our group have backgrounds in psychology, cognitive science, economics, mathematics, biology, and computer science to name but a few. These positions are associated with a multi-institution grant from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme, entitled The Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC): a platform for large scale integrated reasoning and Web-search. In this project, our role is to study how human cognition can be used as a model for information retrieval and reasoning on the semantic web. For example, by using computational models of how people search for information in literature databases we can learn not only about how humans solve the task, but also how this understanding can suggest novel approaches to automated reasoning on the semantic web.

The center provides excellent resources, including support staff and equipment for conducting experiments and computer simulations, generous travel support for conferences, and, most importantly, the time to think.

For more information about our group please visit our homepage at www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/abc and www.larkc.eu to learn more information about the project. The fellows will work under the direction of Henry Brighton, Joerg Rieskamp, & Lael Schooler. If you have questions, please email larkc2008 (at) mpib-berlin.mpg.de. The working language of the center is English, and knowledge of German is not necessary for living in Berlin and enjoying the active life and cultural riches of this city. We strongly encourage applications from women, and members of minority groups. The Max Planck Society is committed to employing more individuals with disabilities and especially encourages them to apply.

Please submit applications (consisting of a cover letter describing research interests, curriculum vitae, up to five reprints, and 3 letters of recommendation) by April 10th, 2008, when the review of applications will begin. However, applications will be accepted 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 larkc2008 (at) mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Referees should send letters of recommendation directly to the email address given above.

Alternatively, under exceptional circumstances, they can be mailed to
Ms. Ilona Prodeus
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Königin-Luise-Strasse 5
14195 Berlin
Germany

POSTDOC OPPORTUNITY AT YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Friend of Decision Science News Cade Massey alerts us to the following opportunity of interest:

The Yale School of Management anticipates appointing a Postdoctoral Associate in Organizational Behavior for a period of two years, with a starting date of September 2008. The Postdoctoral Associate will serve as a Behavioral Lab Research Associate of the Behavioral Laboratory in collaboration with the full-time Lab Manager, and will coordinate several ongoing research projects. The remainder of the Associates time will be dedicated to collaboration with faculty on new and ongoing programs of research and conducting independent research in the Associates area of interest. The position will not require any teaching although opportunities exist for those interested. Salary will be competitive, Yale Benefits are included, and there is the possibility of a research allowance.

We have a growing community of researchers who explore basic and applied problems based in psychology, sociology and economics. We will select an applicant who plans to work collaboratively on research with one or more of the faculty members in the organizational behavior program (James Baron, Heidi Brooks, Daylian Cain, Erica Dawson, Joel Podolny, Cade Massey, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Victor Vroom, and Amy Wrzesniewski). There may also be opportunities to collaborate with faculty whose work is related to research in these areas. The Yale SOM Web page (http://www.mba.yale.edu/faculty/index.asp) provides some detail about faculty research interests.

This position is open to candidates who have recently earned their PhD degree, or who are expecting their PhD in 2008, in any area of psychology or organizational behavior. Experience with methods of experimentation at the social psychological level of analysis is necessary. In particular, experience in conducting computer, web-based, and interpersonal interaction-based experiments is a plus.

Application

Yale University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employee. Yale values diversity among its students, staff, and faculty, and strongly encourages applications from women and underrepresented minorities. Applicants should submit their CV, statement of research interests, and 2 letters of recommendation. Applications are welcome immediately, and they should be received by March 31, 2008 to receive full consideration. To apply online, visit: http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/openings.htm Please note that the Yale School of Management will only be accepting electronic applications. Please visit the website for instructions on how to submit letters of recommendation electronically.

ARIELY, FREY TO SPEAK IN LONDON

We like our history natural

With top-notch JDM researchers at London School of Economics, University College London, London Business School, Westminster Business School, London Metropolitan University, City University London, Imperial College, Birkbeck College, and two weekly JDM talk series (the London Judgment and Decision Making seminar, and the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar, it is no wonder why so many feel that London is the center of the judgment and decision-making research universe. The next few weeks’ speakers, Dan Ariely and Bruno Frey, are extraordinary, which is ordinary for this town.

Dan Ariely at LSE

Date: Monday 17 March 2008
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Dan Ariely
Chair: Professor Lawrence Phillips

Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? Why do we repeatedly make the same mistakes when we make our selections? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? The answers, as revealed by behavioural economist Professor Dan Ariely of MIT, will surprise you.

Dan Ariely is author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, (HarperCollins, £14.99). He is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT where he holds a joint appointment between MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management. He is the principal investigator of the Lab’s eRationality group and co-director of the Lab’s SIMPLICITY consortium. He is interested in issues of rationality, irrationality, decision-making, behavioral economics, and consumer welfare. Projects include examinations of online auction behaviors, personal health monitoring, the effects of different pricing mechanisms, and the development of systems to overcome day-to-day irrationality.

Ariely received a PhD in business administration from Duke University, a PhD and MA in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in psychology from Tel Aviv University.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For more information, email events@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 6043.

If you are planning to attend this event and would like details on how to get here and what time to arrive, please refer to Coming to an event at LSE.

Bruno Frey at Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making (at London Business School)

Date: Tuesday April 1, 2008
Time: 5:30PM -7PM
Speaker: Professor Bruno Frey
Venue: London Business School room LT3

Frey is author of more than a dozen books (all available in English and German, and including a number of translations into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) and more than 350 articles in professional academic journals (most of them in economics and a few in political science, sociology and psychology) including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Oxford Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, Kyklos, Review of Economic Studies, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Public Choice, Review of Income and Wealth, European Journal of Political Research, International Organization, Public Interest, Rationality and Society, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Economic History, etc.

Photo credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/aficionadillos2/2144294675/

DECISION MAKING AND PLANNING UNDER LOW LEVELS OF PREDICTABILITY

The International Journal of Forecasting invites you to submit a paper for a special issue on how to make decisions and plan (or formulate strategies) when our ability to forecast is low, or in some cases nonexistent.

During the last several decades it has become increasingly clear that there are a wide range of events that we cannot predict accurately or reliably. For instance, we now know that the forecasts of experts are not usually more accurate than those of simple models, which in turn are at least as accurate as the most statistically sophisticated ones in many cases. We also know that professional investors do not seem to performbetter than making a random selection of stocks or bonds, and that past performance is not a good indication of future performance. The consequences of this for managing risk are severe. For instance, none of the consequential bank lending crises of the past decades, including the events in 1982 (Latin American lending), 1989–91 (real estate and savings and loans), 1997 (Asian contagion), and 2007 (subprime) were predicted even a couple of months in advance. These failures raise a lot of questions about the role and usefulness of forecasting. Finally, while uncertainty cannot be measured by standard methods that assume that errors are thin-tailed (normally distributed), independent of one another and constant, more sophisticated methods do not seem to produce more reliable results. This raises the question of what we can do practically to face future uncertainty realistically and rationally, and how we should manage our risks.

The editors are soliciting a broad range of papers covering all areas of social science (as well as some outside) including judgmental decision making, finance, business, government, medicine, risk management, and even earthquakes, floods and climate change; in fact, any area where our ability to forecast is limited while the resulting uncertainty is huge.

The critical question that this special issue aims to address is what we can do if we accept the serious limits of predictability in many situations and the huge uncertainty surrounding our future decisions and plans. It is therefore critical to consider and provide practical solutions for how we can live with such uncertainty without either being paralyzed by hesitation, or falling victims of the illusion of control by wrongly believing that we are able to forecast and pretending that uncertainty does not exist.

All contributions will be refereed and maintained at the usual IJF standards. Please refer to the guidelines for preparing papers for submission at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/call.pdf

The deadline for first submissions is June 2008. Please contact one of the editors for inquiries concerning the suitability of a proposed paper. Special issue editors Spyros Makridakis INSEAD, France E-mail address: Spyros.Makridakis at gmail.com. Nassim Nicholas Taleb London Business School, UK E-mail address: nnt at theblackswan.org

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fire_brace/7257910/