Decision Science News

INTERUNIVERSITY DECISION BEHAVIOR TEACHING REPOSITORY

The Interuniversity Decision Behavior Teaching Repository is a harbor for materials on teaching decision making from the world over. The project was started up by J. Frank Yates, with the help of a National Science Foundation grant. In his words:

“The future of judgment and decision making scholarship depends directly on how widely and how well the subject is taught, at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels.

The Repository is intended to be a living storehouse of materials useful to anyone who is interested in teaching decision behavior topics in a dedicated course (e.g., Decision Processes) or within more general courses (e.g., Introduction to Political Science, Finance, Operations Management, Interpersonal Relationships, Clinical Diagnosis).”

Decision researchers are urged to use the resources already in the Repository and to contribute their own: syllabi, exercises, readings, demonstrations, commentaries, assignments, and beyond.

DSN will keep its eyes on the repository and hopes to find much to promote there.

35TH EUROPEAN MARKETING ACADEMY CONFERENCE IN ATHENS GREECE

The 35th European Marketing Academy Conference will take place in Athens, Greece from May 23rd to May 26th, 2006. The self-described aim of the conference is “to determine and interpret the conditions that are necessary for marketing leadership, while relating the findings of academic research with actionable business directions.”

Nearly 1,000 papers have been reviewed for the conference’s 20 tracks. It should be quite a show.

Registration information.

Hotel information.

NASSAU W. SENIOR

Modern decision science, economics, psychology, and marketing have made a cottage industry of intertemporal choice research. The topic has deep roots, including this quote which suggests it’s one of the most important questions there is:

“It may be said that pure abstinence, being a mere negation, cannot produce positive effects; the same remark might as well be applied to intrepidity, or even to liberty; but who ever objected to their being considered as equivalent to active agents? To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will. It is true that such exertions are made, and indeed are frequent in every state of society, except perhaps in the very lowest, and have been made in the very lowest, for society could not otherwise have improved; but of all the means by which man can be raised in the scale of being, abstinence, as it is perhaps the most effective, is the slowest in its increase, and the least generally diffused.” – From Nassau W. Senior Political Economy.

An excellent review of articles on intertemporal choice can be found in G. Lowenstein, D. Read & R. Baumeister (eds.), Time and Decision, NY: Russell Sage.

This is the 100th post of Decision Science News!

ARE DEFAULT EFFECTS CAUSED BY PUBLIC IGNORANCE?

A debate on the Becker-Posner blog includes this hunch by Posner:

One possible reason the weak default rule appears to have a significant effect is public ignorance. The probability that one’s organs will be harvested for use in transplantation must be very slight–so slight that it doesn’t pay to think much about whether one wants to participate in such a program. When the consequences of making a “correct” decision are slight, ignorance is rational, and therefore one expects default rules to have their greatest effect on behavior when people are ignorant of the rule and therefore do not try to take advantage of the opportunity to opt out of it.

A search for some insight into this hunch takes us back to the very first Decision Science News post. The massive default effects found in the real world (pictured above), do not seem to be due to ignorance. The Science article by Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein included a simple experiment in which people were asked to decide their organ donor status upon moving to a new state that either had an opt-in or an opt-out default.

The behavior in experiment mirrored that in the real world, and cannot be explained by ignorance or laziness: every participant read the policy immediately before deciding, and the only effort needed to change from the default was a mouse click. The cause of default effects is still something of a mystery, though DSN hopes to soon report a scoop on this topic.

MOUSELAB WEB

To download a video, click on the image (996Kb AVI).

Friends of DSN Eric Johnson and Martijn Willemsen have created an online version of the popular decision research tool MouseLab.

MouselabWEB is a process tracing tool that can be used to monitor the information acquisition process of decision makers on the web (and in the lab). It is derived from earlier work studying decision processes termed Mouselab (Johnson, Payne, Schkade, & Bettman, 1993).

The design philosophy behind MouselabWEB is to allow process tracing during ordinary web browsing. MouselabWEB uses technology already in the browser: dynamic HTML and Javascript. It works in all recent browsers, and therefore is operating system independent. The end user does not need to download plugins or other software and the pages are small enough to run experiments across a dialup phone connection. For the researcher, MouselabWEB offers a set of scripts to quickly setup and run experiments on the web. It uses mySQL and PHP (which is open source software supported by most hosting services) on the server side to save participant data, but can also used without this technology by using a form mailer that sends the data by email to the experimenter. Included in the package are webbased tools to create pages and manage data:

* A designer program to design pages with MouselabWEB and other questions
* A datalyser program to retrieve and replay a movie of the process data

MouselabWEB has already been used successfully to gather process data on the web, providing replications of well-known experimental results. It is open source (GNU/GPL license) and its developers encourage others to use it and help with development. For more information about MouselabWEB, visit: http://www.mouselabweb.org/

About the authors
Martijn Willemsen is assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Together with Eric Johnson, he designed MouselabWEB during a one year visit as researcher at Columbia University. For more information, see his web site or send him an email.Web Page of Martijn Willemsen

Eric Johnson is professor in the Marketing division of the Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York. For more information, see his web site or send him an email. Web Page of Eric Johnson

2006 INFORMS MARKETING SCIENCE CONFERENCE

The INFORMS Marketing Science Conference abstract deadline is February 1, 2006. Marketing Science is an annual conference that brings together the leading research scholars in marketing, and a small number of individuals from industry and government. The conference falls under the auspices of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) sub-branch whose major purpose is to foster the development, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge, basic and applied research, and science and technologies that improve the understanding and practice of marketing. At the upper echelon of scholar-focused conferences in business, it is a forum where leading scholars in marketing present the results of their latest research.

The Marketing faculty of the University of Pittsburgh invites you to submit abstracts of your research papers, participate in the conference, and get a feel for the Pittsburgh community.

DSN has always been fond of Pittsburgh, PA, and the Carnegie Mellon Children’s School, of which the DSN editor is an alumnus.

2006 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference Call for papers , Download pdf

The conference runs between the afternoon of Thursday, June 8, 2006, and the evening of Saturday, June 10, 2006. While parallel sessions are planned during the day, the evenings will consist of a reception (Thursday) and an awards dinner (Friday) and a potpourri of optional activities (Saturday). The venue is the Westin Convention Center Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. Please make reservations at the Westin as Soon as possible.

ACR 2006. ORLANDO. SEP 28-OCT 1. NO SUNDAY. DEADLINE: MARCH 17.

The 2006 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research will be held at the Renaissance Orlando Resort at Seaworld in Orlando, Florida, from Thursday September 28 through Sunday October 1, 2006.

As in past years, the conference will provide a multi-topical forum for scholarly presentations, discussions, and collaborations on consumer behavior. However, the format of this year’s conference will be slightly different from previous years. The opening reception will take place on Thursday evening as usual. However, in a shift from previous ACR conferences, regular presentation sessions will take place only on Friday and Saturday, with Sunday being reserved for research meetings, informal discussion of sessions, etc. Please note Sunday is still an official scheduled conference day.

Additional specific information on submissions of special sessions, competitive papers, working papers, roundtables, and films is provided below.

PROGRAM STRUCTURE
As in the recent past, there will be five main forums for the presentation and discussion of research and scholarly thought.

Special Topic Sessions: provide opportunities for focused attention on cutting-edge and important topics. Successful sessions offer a coherent perspective on emerging substantive, theoretical, or methodological issues.

Competitive Paper Sessions: include papers that represent the completed work of their authors. The ACR conference co-chairs assign accepted papers to Conference sessions that reflect similar scholarly interests.

Working Paper Track: Participants typically present preliminary findings from the early stages of a research program. Authors distribute their papers and display their findings poster-style in a plenary session.

Roundtables: Encourage intensive participant discussion of consumer research topics and issues.

Film Festival: presents edited video recordings on topics related to consumer behavior. This year’s Film Festival theme is “Making an Impact.”

SUBMISSION AND DECISION DEADLINES

Submissions for competitive papers, working papers, roundtables, and special topic session proposals must be received no later than Friday March 17, 2006. Notification of acceptance in these four categories will be made by Friday July 14, 2006. The entry deadline for Film Festival submissions is Friday June 30, 2006. Notification of accepted films will be Monday July 31, 2006.

To give as many people as possible the opportunity to participate in ACR 2006, note the requirement that each ACR participant may present in Special Topic and/or Competitive Paper sessions no more than twice during the duration of the conference.

Call for papers

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DECISION MAKING

The January 2006 Harvard Business Review provides a managerially oriented summary of the history of decision making, including the concept of “fast and frugal” reasoning, coined right here at Decision Science News.

Quote:
“The study of decision making, consequently, is a palimpsest of intellectual disciplines: mathematics, sociology, psychology, economics, and political science, to name a few. Philosophers ponder what our decisions say about ourselves and about our values; historians dissect the choices leaders make at critical junctures. Research into risk and organizational behavior springs from a more practical desire: to help managers achieve better outcomes. And while a good decision does not guarantee a good outcome, such pragmatism has paid off. A growing sophistication with managing risk, a nuanced understanding of human behavior, and advances in technology that support and mimic cognitive processes have improved decision making in many situations.

Even so, the history of decision-making strategies is not one of unalloyed progress toward perfect rationalism. In fact, over the years we have steadily been coming to terms with constraints–both contextual and psychological–on our ability to make optimal choices. Complex circumstances, limited time, and inadequate mental computational power reduce decision makers to a state of “bounded rationality,” argues Simon. While Simon suggests that people would make economically rational decisions if only they could gather enough information, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identify factors that cause people to decide against their economic interest even when they know better. Antonio Damasio draws on work with brain-damaged patients to demonstrate that in the absence of emotion it is impossible to make any decisions at all. Erroneous framing, bounded awareness, excessive optimism: the debunking of Descartes’s rational man threatens to swamp our confidence in our choices, with only improved technology acting as a kind of empirical breakwater.

Faced with the imperfectability of decision making, theorists have sought ways to achieve, if not optimal outcomes, at least acceptable ones. Gerd Gigerenzer urges us to make a virtue of our limited time and knowledge by mastering simple heuristics, an approach he calls “fast and frugal” reasoning. Amitai Etzioni proposes “humble decision making,” an assortment of nonheroic tactics that include tentativeness, delay, and hedging. Some practitioners, meanwhile, have simply reverted to the old ways. Last April, a Japanese television equipment manufacturer turned over its $20 million art collection to Christie’s when the auction house trounced archrival Sotheby’s in a high-powered round of rock-paper-scissors, a game that may date back as far as Ming Dynasty China.”

Source:
Buchanan, L., O’Connell, A., (2006). A brief history of decision making. Harvard Business Review, 84(1)

THE DISTRIBUTION BUILDER

To download a video, click on the image (6.7MB AVI).

The Distribution Builder is a tool that lets people specify the probability distributions of risk they would like to have apply to their own future. Think about using it to choose the outcomes you’d like to see from your investments, insurance policies, and medical procedures. Read about it here:

Goldstein, D. G., Johnson, E. J., & Sharpe, W. F. (working paper). Measuring Consumer Risk-Return Tradeoffs. Coming soon to a journal near you.

FAQs

Can I see a video of the Distribution Builder?

Yes, click on the image above to download.

Can I show a video of the Distribution Builder to my class?

Yes, this video may be used for non-commercial purposes, as detailed in the Creative Commons License on the main page of this site.

I need to gather distributions from people for an experiment I am running. Can the Distribution Builder do that?

Yes, the Distribution Builder can be used to elicit any kind of distribution, constrained or unconstrained.

I want to study people’s preferences for two-alternative gambles, can the Builder do that?

Yes, the current Distribution Builder can display between 2 and 100 units of probability.

I want to have people create gambles they see as equivalent to other gambles, given constraints. Can it do that?

Yes, the Distribution Builder can be set such that any number of the markers are fixed in place.

Is the Distribution Builder publicly available?

We hope to make the basic GUI framework available in the future, with no promises as to when that will be. Watch this site for more information.

2006 Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference

The 2006 Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference will be hosted by the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Local Organizing Committee

Shlomo Benartzi |Conference Coordinator
Craig Fox | Program Chair
Kristin Diehl | USC
Sanjay Sood | UCLA

Organizing Committee

Colin Camerer | Caltech
Rachel Croson | University of Pennsylvania
Joel Huber | Duke University
Eric Johnson | Columbia University
Thomas Langer | University of Muenster
Lisa Ordóñez | University of Arizona
Maurice Schweitzer | University of Pennsylvania
Richard Thaler | University of Chicago
George Wu | University of Chicago

Chair, Teaching Pre-conference

J. Frank Yates | University of Michigan

Chair, Tversky Symposium

Eldar Shafir | Princeton University

Webmaster (Submissions & Review)

Alan Schwartz | University of Illinois at Chicago

Loew’s Santa Monica Beach Hotel
June 15-18, 2006
Submission deadline: March 1, 2006