Decision Science News

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

COLLABORATIVE & MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH 2ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Yale Center for Consumer Insights at the Yale School of Management

May 4-6, 2006

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts: February 1, 2006

Abstracts are invited for the 2nd annual conference to be held at the Yale School of Management on May 4 – 6, 2006. This year’s conference, sponsored by the Yale Center for Customer Insights and the Marketing Science Institute, is to commemorate and honor Dick Wittink’s commitment to multidisciplinary and collaborative research, and his belief that there is great value in gathering together scholars and practitioners who are collaborating on rigorous and relevant research.

The inaugural conference, held last year from December 10-12, 2005 had over 100 attendees, with one third executives and two third academics. Participants included people from all over the US and representing over forty schools. Corporate representation included IBM, Intel, P&G, Coca Cola, CVS, Lufthansa, and Dream Works Pictures. The conference was also attended by people from other countries such as Holland, Germany, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, and Singapore.

Abstracts on any of the following topics are welcomed:

*Behavioral Decision Theory
*Competition
*Consumer Preference Measurement
*Health Care
*ROI Based Marketing
*Scanner Data & Econometric Modeling

Abstracts should be two pages, double-spaced. They will be reviewed by the conference committee comprised of Ravi Dhar, Subrata Sen, and K. Sudhir (Yale); Pradeep Chintagunta, (Chicago); Peter Leeflang, (Groningen); David Reibstein, (Wharton); and Naufel Vilcassim, (LBS).

Conference sessions of ninety minutes each will allow for the presentation of three papers. Abstracts should be sent to Eugenia.hayes at yale.edu by February 1, 2006. Presenters will be notified by March 1, 2006.

The registration fee is $200. The registration form can be downloaded from our website www.cci.som.yale.edu.

The registration deadline is April 1, 2006. Presenter’s registration fee, travel, and hotel expenses will be paid by the Yale Center for Customer Insights.

DSN is fanatically committed to interdisciplinary research.

POSTDOCTORAL TRAINEESHIP IN QUANTITATIVE METHODS: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

NIMH funded training in quantitative methods for behavioral and social science. Appointment commences July or August 2006. Seminars on advanced topics include; combinatorial methods for data analysis, decision theory, mathematical psychology, multidimensional scaling, multivariate analysis, and social choice modeling. Opportunities for both methodological and applications research. Faculty includes: C. Anderson, D. Budescu, H. Chang, J. Douglass, S. Hong, L. Hubert, A. Klein, J. Meulman, G. Miller, M. Regenwetter, B. Roberts, J. Spencer-Smith and M. Wang. Stipend range: $35,568 to $41,796. Applicants should be US citizens or have been admitted for permanent residence. Funding limits appointments to individuals who are no more than two years post-PhD.

Curriculum Vitae, statement of research interests, reprints, and three letters of recommendation should be sent to: Prof. Michel Regenwtter, c/o Kim Mallory, NIMH Training Program in Quantitative Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel, Champaign, Illinois 61820. e-mail: regenwet at uiuc.edu Submissions must be received by February 28, 2006.

DSN can vouch that some very good people have gone through this postdoc program.

THE EDWARDS BAYESIAN RESEARCH CONFERENCE

Photo by Jim Shanteau

Ward Edwards, one of the main founders of the field of behavioral decision making, hosted the Bayesian Research Conference annually since 1961. For many years the conference was held in Studio City, CA, near Ward’s home. It is now hosted by Michael Birnbaum and Jie Weiss, JDM members from Cal State Fullerton, and has been moved to their campus. With the passing of Ward in 2005, we are honoring him and flattering ourselves by henceforth attaching his name to the conference.

The conference will take place January 12-13, 2006 in Fullerton, California

Features of the Edwards Bayesian Research Conference:

1) An intimate, friendly two-day meeting with no parallel sessions, lots of time for informal discussion, and low registration fee ($50). Sessions meet on the campus of Cal State Fullerton; excellent rates ($89 including breakfast and a Jacuzzi in every room) are available at the nearby Chase Suites.

2) An eclectic program. The label “Bayesian” was actually more narrow that the conference. Although there have always been talks about Bayesian analysis and reasoning, the talks in recent years have covered a wide variety of topics in both theoretical and applied aspects of decision making. Ward was very open-minded, and we will follow that tradition. Ward always asked for people to bring new ideas, even if not fully baked, for him to mull over. Two particular traditions of the Conference are that paper titles will be “improved” to be humorous and that time is allocated for discussion after every presentation.

3) The Conference is held prior to the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, with paper sessions Thursday and Friday. There will also be a reception Wednesday evening in the hotel and a party Friday evening (another of Ward’s traditions) at the nearby home of David and Jie Weiss.

4) It’s usually warm and sunny in Southern California in January (but there is non-zero utility attached to the umbrella at the bottom of the suitcase). On the Saturday following the conference, there will be a (no-cost) tennis session for those who dare.

5) The Cal State Fullerton campus is easily reached using Super Shuttle or Prime Time Shuttle. The closest four commercial airports are (in order of proximity):

Long Beach (LGB)
John Wayne-Orange County (SNA)
Ontario International (ONT)
Los Angeles International (LAX)

If you are interesting in attending, please see the conference website for further information (http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/bayes/) and a registration form. Please register before December 7, 2005.

Editors note: DSN has been to this conference twice and both times left having made meaningful acquaintances. Call it the small conference advantage.

INTERNATIONAL CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY CONFERENCE

London Business School invites submissions to the third in a series of international corporate responsibility conferences (following the Haas conference in 2005 and the Boston conference in 2003). Topics for inclusion range widely but those of particular interest explore the implications of corporate responsibility, globalization and global business for business and marketing strategy. Research papers can be either empirical or conceptual. A selection of papers presented will be considered for a special issue of the California Management Review.

Abstracts must clearly identify your research question(s) and the actual/proposed methodology used. You will receive notice by January 31st, 2006 as to whether your topic has been selected for inclusion in the conference. Authors of successful submissions will be invited to submit a paper.

Please submit a maximum 500-word abstract of your topic to ncsmith at london.edu

Proposal submission deadline December 31st, 2005.

Topic areas include the following:

Consumer behavior, branding & corporate responsibility

· Brand equity as a driver of attention to corporate responsibility (e.g., how does corporate responsibility affect consumer behavior?)
· Vulnerabilities of global brands to corporate responsibility failures
· Cause-related marketing and corporate responsibility

Marketing mix and corporate responsibility issues

· Socially responsible pricing (e.g., essential medicines)
· Environmental impacts of products and packaging
· Supply chains and ethical sourcing (e.g., preventing sweatshops, supply chain monitoring and compliance)

Developing strategies for corporate responsibility

· Developing corporate responsibility strategies, including auditing the business and formulating corporate responsibility objectives
· Culture-specific interpretations of corporate responsibility, including developing country versus developed-country perceptions of corporate responsibility issues
· Strategies for the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (e.g., business opportunities in poor communities of developing countries, limitations of BOP strategies)

Corporate responsibility organization and management

· “Mainstreaming” corporate responsibility (embedding corporate responsibility in the day-to-day activities of the firm)
· Effective stakeholder engagement (e.g., developing stakeholder engagement skills, differences in stakeholder expectations across countries)
· Employees as drivers of attention to corporate responsibility

Metrics & reporting

· Measuring social and environmental performance of the global firm
· Linking corporate responsibility performance to economic performance and marketing metrics (e.g., sales, market share, brand equity)
· Social reporting challenges (e.g., effective communications, consumer backlash, legal, etc.)

Conference co-chairs:

N. Craig Smith, London Business School C.B. Bhattacharya, School of Management, Boston University David Levine, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

The London Business School is grateful to the following sponsors for their financial support of this conference: Aspen Institute, Boston University, California Management Review, the Haas School of Business Center for Responsible Business (University of California, Berkeley), and London Business School.