Decision Science News

SBST FELLOWSHIPS BEGINNING OCTOBER 2016

The White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) is currently seeking new team members to join in Washington, D.C. for a one-year fellowship beginning in October 2016. Since its inception in 2014, the SBST has completed over 15 randomized evaluations with a diverse set of agency collaborators. Learn more about the President’s recent Executive Order “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People,” the 2015 Annual Report, the team and recent activities by visiting the team’s website, https://sbst.gov.

Fellows and Associate Fellows translate insights from the social and behavioral sciences into concrete recommendations on how to improve Federal programs, policies, and operations. We work closely with agency collaborators to identify the opportunities for improvement and to evaluate the relative efficiency and effectiveness of proposed interventions.

To learn more about the responsibilities and qualifications of Fellow and Associate Fellows, and details on how to apply for this unique opportunity, please visit https://sbst.gov/apply. The deadline to submit an application is 11:59 PM on Sunday, January 24th, 2016.

Please contact sbst@gsa.gov with any questions.

SELF CORRECTION HELPED PSYCHOLOGY’S REPUTATION

Science Magazine’s list of scientific breakthroughs for 2015 included the Psychology’s reproducibility project. While it didn’t win breakthrough of the year, the reproducibility project has been praised in other year-end roundups, according to the APS.

Low replication rates hurt psychology’s reputation, but the project that discovered these rates helped it. The positive effects of the project will be felt for a long time.

SECTION CHIEF, DECISION MAKING AND BEHAVIORAL STUDIES, CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU

CFPB Job Announcement as PDF

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking an experienced researcher to lead the Decision Making and Behavioral Studies team within the Office of Research. This interdisciplinary team holds expertise spanning economics, psychology, and decision sciences, and conducts primary research to build foundational knowledge on behavioral science as well as provides input into policy projects. The team designs and fields surveys; implements the current research agendas on disclosure and the dynamics of household balance sheets; support rulemaking teams in developing and implementing policy; advises cross-agency teams on the design and evaluation of public-facing tools to support consumer financial decision-making; develops and conducts economic experiments in laboratory settings that contribute to foundational knowledge on consumer decision-making; and collaborates with financial services providers to conduct rigorous field trials of financial products and disclosures that have promising opportunities for consumers’ finances and comprehension of financial products.

The ideal candidates will have a Ph.D. in economics, psychology, or other social sciences; demonstrated expertise in behavioral science through peer-reviewed journal articles and other publications; experience leading projects that incorporate primary data collection methods, including randomized controlled field trials, laboratory experiments, or surveys; and leadership and management experience.

Interested? Contact jobs@cfpb.gov

CLOCK TICKING TOWARDS COBE AND BDRM DEADLINES

Two great conferences for decision research folks have deadlines of December 30, 2015.

COBE (Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments) DEADLINE DEC 30, 2015

See the call for papers. COBE takes place in April 2016 in Montreal.

BDRM (Behavioral Decision Research in Management) DEADLINE DEC 30, 2015

See the call for papers. BDRM takes place in Toronto in June 2016.

VISUALIZING COUNTRIES IN TERMS OF US STATES

Syria is about the size of Florida with about the same population

 

 

Change how you see the world. Put things into perspective!

In our most labor-intensive post ever, Jake Hofman and I have created, for every country in the world, a way to think of that country’s area and population in terms of US states. It’s all part of a larger project improving comprehension of numbers in the news. [See our working paper, a longer version of which was recently accepted at CHI 2016].

You’ll see 13 fascinating examples below. Check them out and come back to …

… educate yourself and contribute valuable data

We’re trying to advance the science of examples. What example should a teacher or journalist use when putting a country into perspective? For instance, in the image above, we could have said that Syria is about the same size as Washington but with three times the population. This is factually more accurate, but might also be more difficult for people to remember or use. So we thought we might get some feedback from readers and find out what makes appealing examples

Please go here, hit “random”, vote for an example, hit “submit” and repeat until you’re bored silly. You’ll be advancing research that can help teachers, journalists, and scientists communicate better.

You can see every country here.

Afghanistan is about the size of Texas with about the same population

 

Australia is about 10 times the size of Texas with about the same population

 

 

Austria is about the size of Virginia with about the same population

 

 

China is about the size of The United States with about 4 times the population

 

 

Germany is about the size of California with about twice the population

 

 

Iraq is about the size of California with about the same population

 

 

Israel is about the size of New Jersey with about the same population

 

 

Japan is about the size of California with about 3 times the population

 

 

Kenya is about the size of Texas with about twice the population

 

 

North Korea is about the size of New York with about the same population

 

 

Philippines is about the size of New Mexico with about 50 times the population

 

 

Turkey is about the size of Texas with about 3 times the population

 

 

United Kingdom is about the size of Wyoming with about 100 times the population

 

 

We’ve done something similar before, but just for area, and it didn’t have pictures. This is so much better (and harder). Want to reward our hard work? Go here, hit “random”, and give us precious training data.

INTERVIEW SERIES WITH JUDGMENT AND DECISION-MAKING RESEARCHERS

JDM (Judgment and Decision Making) researchers like Reid Hastie and Tom Wallsten have participated in the online interview series “Talking about Decisions” produced by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Enjoy the interviews!

Talking about decisions with Reid Hastie

Talking about decisions with Tom Wallsten

The YouTube Channel also features lectures on decision making, for example:

Robin Hogarth on Why Simple Solutions aren’t

Kathleen Eisenhardt on Simple Rules

COBE SUBMISSION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 30, 2015

Call for Papers: Fourth Annual Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments (COBE 2016), a workshop at WWW 2016, Montreal, Canada

Overview
The World Wide Web has resulted in new and unanticipated avenues for conducting large-scale behavioral experiments. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, Upwork, TaskRabbit, among others, have given researchers access to a large participant pool that operates around the clock. As a result, behavioral researchers in academia have turned to crowdsourcing sites in large numbers. Moreover, websites like eBay, Yelp and Reddit have become places where researchers can conduct field experiments. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! conduct hundreds of randomized experiments on a daily basis. We may be rapidly reaching a point where most behavioral experiments will be done online.

The main purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers conducting behavioral experiments online to share new results, methods and best practices.

Basic Information
Submission Deadline: December 30, 2015
Notification Date: February 2, 2016
Workshop Date: TBA but between April 11 and 13th, 2016.
Cocktails: At the Bar
Location: Montreal, Canada. A workshop before the 25th International World Wide Web Conference: http://www2016.ca/ which takes place April 11-15, 2016.

Topics of Interest
Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:

• Crowdsourcing
• Online behavioral experiments
• Online field experiments
• Online natural or quasi-experiments
• Online surveys
• Human Computation

Paper Submission
Submit papers electronically by visiting https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cobe2016, logging in or creating an account, and clicking New Submission at the top left.

Submissions are non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish their results subsequently in archival journals or conferences. There will be no published proceedings. Submissions should be up to two (2) pages of text, with an optional extra page for figures and references only.

The submission deadline is December 30, 2015

Organizing Committee
Siddharth Suri, Microsoft Research NYC
Winter A. Mason, Facebook
Daniel G. Goldstein, Microsoft Research NYC & London Business School

Program Committee
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Pavel Atanasov, Polly Portfolio
Eytan Bakshy, Facebook
Laura Brandimarte, Carnegie Mellon University
Jesse J. Chandler, Mathematica
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Nicolas Della Penna, Australian National University
Dean Eckles, MIT Sloan School of Business
Alice Gao, University of British Columbia
Sam Gosling, University of Texas at Austin
John Horton, NYU Stern
Brian Keegan, Northeastern University
Peter Krafft, MIT
Andrew Mao, Microsoft Research
Akitaka Matsuo, Nuffield College, Oxford University
Gabriele Paolacci, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Eyal Pe’Er, Bar-Ilan University
Ragan Petrie, George Mason University
Alexander Peysakhovich, Facebook
David Rand, Yale Unviersity
David Rothschild, Microsoft Research
Sven Seuken, University of Zurich
Sean Taylor, Facebook
Florian Teschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Microsoft Research
Jens Witkowski, ETH Zurich
Georgios Zervas, Boston University School of Management
Peter Zubcsek, University of Florida Warrington College of Business

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE DECEMBER 12, 2015

What: Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making
When: May 22nd – 24th, 2016
Where: St. Julien Hotel, Boulder, Colorado
Deadline: December 12, 2015

Conference Overview
The Boulder Summer Conference in Consumer Financial Decision Making, now in its 7th year, is the world’s foremost interdisciplinary conference for discussion of research on consumer financial decision-making. Our goal is to stimulate cross-disciplinary conversation and improve basic and applied research in the emerging area of consumer financial decision-making. This research can inform our understanding of how consumers actually make such decisions and how consumers can be helped to make better decisions by innovations in public policy, business, and consumer education. Please see the 2015 program on the conference website to see abstracts of research by scholars in economics, psychology, sociology, behavioral finance, consumer research, decision sciences, behavioral economics, and law. Our format allows a very high level of opportunity for conversation and interaction around the ideas presented.

Submitting Abstracts for the 2016 Conference
To submit an extended abstract (1 page single spaced pdf), please visit the conference website and click on the Submit Paper Abstract link.

The conference co-chairs will select papers for presentation at the conference based on extended abstracts. Selected papers must not be published prior to the conference, but those researchers presenting their work at the conference must commit to have a paper that is complete and available for review by discussants one month prior to the conference. Selections will be based on quality, relevance to consumers’ financial decision-making, and contribution to breadth of topics and disciplinary approaches. We consider not just the individual merits of the papers, but how they pair with another submission from a scholar in a different field. The organizers will invite authors of the best papers not selected for presentation at a plenary session to present their work at the Sunday evening poster session.

The abstract submission deadline is December 12, 2015

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 2016 CONFERENCE AND RELATED EVENTS

SJDM Conference
This year’s (2015) SJDM annual conference will be in Chicago, Illinois, at the Chicago Hilton, November 20-23. Late registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 20.

• The 2015 final program.
• Poster guidelines
• Talk guidelines

As of now you must register when you arrive at the meeting. The registration fee is $410 for regular members, $445 for non-members, and $205 for student members. Membership dues are still $35 ($10 for students).

This year’s program committee is Katherine Milkman (chair), Jack Soll, Nina Mazar, and Suzanne Shu

Tribute to Paul Slovic
A tribute for Paul Slovic that will take place Friday, November 20 from 5:30-7:30pm at the conference hotel (Hilton – Williford Room).

The program will celebrate Paul’s major contributions to research on preference construction, risk perception, and decisions by analysis versus decisions by feelings. It will highlight his influence on generations of JDM and other scholars and his leadership in using his work to address real world social problems. Ellen Peters will chair the session. The speakers will include well-known experts in risk perception and decision research including Daniel Kahneman, Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Kunreuther, John Payne, Bob O’Connor, Melissa Finucane, Bill Burns, Daniel Vastfjall, and Scott Slovic. Their presentations will build on Paul’s contributions, showing their relevance to current research and their promise for influencing future developments.We may even get Paul to say a few words at the end! The tribute is organized by Ellen Peters (Chair), John Payne, Craig Fox, and Melissa Finucane.

Neuroeconomics social
There will be an inaugural Society for Neuroeconomics mixer at SJDM. Whether you identify as a decision neuroscientist, neuroeconomist, or consumer neuroscientist, you are welcome at an evening of socializing and networking. Meet up with your old friends and make some new ones at this social during SJDM. Ian Krajbich and Crystal Reeck are organizing.

Date: Saturday, November 21, 2015
Time: 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: First Draft craft beer house – 649 S Clark http://www.firstdraftchicago.com/

Photo credit:https://flic.kr/p/p6HUhT

BEHAVIORAL DECISION RESEARCH IN MANAGEMENT (BDRM) AT TORONTO’S ROTMAN SCHOOL

What: Behavioral Decision Research in Management 2016 Conference
Where: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
When: June 9-11, 2016

Submissions of papers are invited for the 15th biennial conference on Behavioral Decision Research in Management (#BDRM2016), to be held at the Rotman School of Management, Toronto, Canada, on June 9-11, 2016.

BDRM is the leading conference for behavioural research conducted in business schools. We encourage submissions of original work in all areas of behavioural research including, but not limited to, the areas of decision making, consumer behaviour, experimental and behavioural economics, decision analysis, behavioural finance, organizational behaviour, negotiation, behavioural strategy, behavioural operations research, behavioural accounting, and medical and legal decision making.

We are glad to announce the following keynote speakers:

Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich
Elke U. Weber, Columbia University

Submission information and deadlines

Submissions for the BDRM conference are due by December 30, 2015. Notification of acceptances will be sent in late March 2016.

Abstract should include a brief description of the research problem, the key methodology and assumptions, and a summary of major results and implications. Abstracts will be selected for oral presentation by blind review (no author names or affiliations should appear on the abstracts).

Abstracts should not exceed three (3) pages double-spaced, Times New Roman, font size 12, and can be submitted in Word or .pdf format. No math symbols should be used and tables and diagrams should be minimal.

Each participant may present only one paper. When submitting papers to this conference, you must agree to be available at any time on June 10 and June 11, 2016 to give your presentation. If you will not be available on one of these days, please arrange for a co-author to give the presentation. We will not consider date/time change requests for presentations.

We will be grouping four competitive papers into a single 75 minute session. Each author will have approximately 15 minutes to present their work. The last 15 minutes will be dedicated to questions.

Papers accepted by the reviewers will be conditionally accepted until at least one author registers for the conference.

All submissions will be conducted electronically through the conference website. The website is now open to submissions.
The conference website provides additional information about the conference, including accommodations:

http://inside.rotman.utoronto.ca/bdrm2016/

Conference co-chairs:
Sanford DeVoe, Tanjim Hossain, Nina Mazar, Claire Tsai, Min Zhao, Chenbo Zhong