Decision Science News

SYSTEMATIC CREATIVITY

We at Decision Science News are big believers in systematic idea generation. More on that in other posts. For now, we’re happy to announce a new book by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg called Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results. The gist of this research is to demystify the creative process by showing how good ideas can come about from rules and patterns. Being creative is not a mysterious, unstructured process attributable to only muses and luck.

What’s more, systematic creativity is fun. We’ve taken part in a seminar of theirs and it was really stimulating. If you take an improv theater class, you’ll learn that improv is, in essence, using constraints to improve the creative process.

SOME DOCTORS GET MORE MALPRACTICE SUITS THAN OTHERS

A month ago, we reported on a paper looking at complaints against doctors which found that 3% of doctors receive about half of the complaints.

This prompted our friend Jim, who is a lawyer, and a good one, to email, “you want to look at real complaints, check this out, it’s got lawsuits against doctors. So we did. This turned out to be the National Practitioner Data Bank, a publicly available database of complaints among doctors and other professions.

We did the same analysis as in the paper cited last month, except that now we looked at malpractice reports filed against doctors in the United States. The result, shown in the graph above, is that malpractice reports are quite skewed as well. (See last month’s post for some useful annotations that may help reading the graph). Our takeaway is for malpractice reports:

1.5% of doctors receive 24% of malpractice reports
3.2% of doctors receive 37% of malpractice reports
7.8% of doctors receive 61% of malpractice reports
22.2% of doctors receive 100% of malpractice reports (i.e. 78% of docs receive none)

This was kind of a quick and dirty analysis, so no guarantees this is correct. If you’re interested in the data, drop us a line.

Powerlaw fans (and there are so, so many out there) may want to know that the data plot out thusly on a log-log scale:

Plots were made using the R language for statistical computing and Hadley Wickham‘s ggplot2 package.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN MARKETING (IJRM): SPECIAL ISSUES ON DIGITAL BRANDING, ENTERTAINMENT

The International Journal of Research in Marketing ( IJRM ) announces two special issues:

IJRM Special Issue on BRANDING IN A DIGITALLY-EMPOWERING WORLD
Guest Editors: Tulin Erdem (New York University), Kevin Lane Keller (Dartmouth College), Dmitri Kuksov (University of Texas at Dallas) and Rik Pieters (Tilburg University).

The International Journal of Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue on Branding in a Digitally Empowered World. The last decade has seen technological developments that have transformed markets and marketing. Both consumers and firms have new capabilities that they could not have even dreamed of a few short years ago (see below). Empowered consumers are meeting equally empowered firms as both groups have access to increasingly detailed information about just about anything or anyone. Consumers can choose to become as involved as they want with a brand, with their influence ranging from just posting comments and evaluations at one end of a continuum to actually determining the nature and direction of a brand at the other end. Similarly, firms can choose to become as involved as they wish with consumers, from hosting a brand web site at one end of the continuum to actively engaging and interacting with consumers in product and brand development at the other end. Many of the rules of branding are changing and many new rules are being introduced in this new digital era. This special issue of IJRM will focus on the latest thinking and research in branding that reflects the enhanced consumer and firm capabilities in a digitally-empowering world.
New consumers capabilities enable the consumers to:
Use the Internet as a powerful information and purchasing aid
Collect fuller and richer information on products, services, brands, and firms
Search, communicate, and purchase on the move
Tap into social media to share opinions and express loyalty with others
Interact actively with firms
Digitally receive ads, coupons, and other marketing materials
Easily compare prices and seek discounts

New firms capabilities enable the firms to:
Use the Internet as a powerful information and sales channel
Collect fuller and richer information about markets, customers, prospects, and competitors
Reach consumers on the move with mobile marketing
Tap into social media to amplify their brand message
Facilitate and speed external communication among customers
Send targeted ads, coupons, samples, and information to customers
Dynamically set prices to reflect different levels of supply and demand

This special issue aims to capture and publish the latest thinking on Branding in a Digitally Empowered World. Without limiting the scope of the papers to be submitted, we encourage original empirical, behavioral, analytical, or managerial work studying the following:

• How much control do firms have over their brands in this environment? How much control should they exert over their brands when consumers may want to redefine the brand? Are some of the brands really owned by the consumers and if so, what does it mean in terms of brand management?
• How should firms develop fully integrated channel and communication strategies to best reflect the wide variety of digital options? How to evaluate the consistency of messages across so many touch points in this environment? How to measure the effectiveness of an integrated branding communications campaign?
• How to capture the dynamics of brand evolution in such an environment?
• What factors affect consumer’s sense of empowerment and level of engagement with brands in general or for any particular brand?
• What are the optimal metrics and response strategies that firms should employ with social media?
• How are ads, promotions and other communications processed by consumers differently digitally as compared to their traditional counterparts?
• What are the costs and benefits of firms adopting yield pricing strategies to optimize supply and demand?

The deadline for initial submission to this special issue is March 31, 2014. The review process will feature a maximum of two rounds and final decisions will be made before April 2015. Given the limited time-window for revising papers, the editors’ aim in most cases is to make a decision on the first round. It is therefore important that submissions are as polished as possible. When submitting a paper (http://ees.elsevier.com/ijrm), authors should mention that the paper should be considered for this special issue. Inquiries can be sent to editor-ijrm@idc.ac.il.

IJRM Special Issue on THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
Guest Editors: Jehoshua Eliashberg (University of Pennsylvania), Thorsten Hennig-Thurau (University of Münster and City University London), Charles B. Weinberg (University of British Columbia) and Berend Wierenga (Erasmus University Rotterdam).

The International Journal of Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue on The Entertainment Industry. Although early academic research on the entertainment industry focused on the TV and movie industries, recent work has expanded to consider such fields as home video, games, music, performing and visual arts, sports events, books, and apps. In this special issue we take a broad approach to the entertainment industry, which is characterized by three elements: it is creativity-driven, its products are experiential in nature, and, marketing has played an increasingly important, but sometimes controversial, role in research and practice.
There are many reasons for an increased interest in the entertainment industry. First, the industry has high economic importance in the global economy, with global entertainment industry revenues exceeding US$ 1.7 trillion in 2012. Second, technical innovations have changed the dynamics of traditional industries and led to the development of new ones, making entertainment a hotbed of innovation in both content creation and distribution. Technology has also dramatically changed the market scope and competitive structure from largely being locally based to now often being globally oriented, and presenting new challenges such as piracy. Third, digitization of the media has also influenced the way people consume entertainment; the industry has to adapt to consumers becoming increasingly active and networked. For example, many consumers now multi-task, use multiple platforms, and use multiple media formats (e.g., movies, games, and social media) interdependently. Fourth, the entertainment industry has high social and cultural significance. The tension between “mass culture” and “high culture,” and between global markets and local tastes, and claims such as the “internet is free” are only some of the sources of controversy and research attention.
This special issue of IJRM will focus on the latest thinking and research in the field of entertainment. Our goal is to be broad in terms of the research questions and methodologies employed and in the range of topics to be studied. In this special issue, we anticipate providing researchers with an editorial team of expert reviewers passionately devoted to the entertainment industry and readers with a focused place to find the most creative research in the field at the highest level of research quality. While we invite a broad array of research approaches and topics, as indicated above, we are particularly interested in high-quality research that has an impact on practice. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• The role of creativity in generating new products and distribution mechanisms
• Products and product development for entertainment
• Distribution channels, including digital channels
• Diffusion and adoption of entertainment goods, including the role of social media
• Consumer behavior, demand prediction and advertising for entertainment media
• Business models and pricing in the entertainment industry
• Managerial, organizational, and institutional issues
• Marketing across entertainment types and media formats
• The influence of mobility on entertainment
The deadline for initial submission to this special issue is May 31, 2014. The review process will feature a maximum of two rounds and final decisions will be made before November 30, 2015. Given the limited time-window for revising papers, the editors’ aim in most cases is to make a decision on the first round. It is therefore important that submissions are as polished as possible. When submitting a paper (http://ees.elsevier.com/ijrm), authors should mention that the paper should be considered for this special issue. Inquiries can be sent to editor-ijrm@idc.ac.il.

TIME-SHARING EXPERIMENTS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (TESS)

James Druckman and Jeremy Freese pass this message along:

We are pleased to announce that Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences ( TESS ) was renewed for another round of funding by NSF starting last Fall. TESS allows researchers to submit proposals for experiments to be conducted on a nationally-representative, probability-based Internet platform, and successful proposals are fielded at no cost to investigators. More information about how TESS works and how to submit proposals is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org.

Additionally, we are pleased to announce the development of two new proposal mechanisms. Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Science’s Short Studies Program (SSP) is accepting proposals for fielding very brief population-based survey experiments on a general population of at least 2000 adults. SSP recruits participants from within the U.S. using the same Internet-based platform as other TESS studies. More information about SSP and proposal requirements is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/ssp.html.

TESS’s Special Competition for Young Investigators is accepting proposals from June 15th-September 15th. The competition is meant to enable younger scholars to field large-scale studies and is limited to graduate students and individuals who are no more than 3 years post-Ph.D. More information about the Special Competition and proposal requirements is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/yic.html.

For the current grant, the principal investigators are Jeremy Freese and James Druckman of Northwestern University, who are assisted by a new team of over 65 Associate PIs and peer reviewers across the social sciences. More information about our APIs is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/associatepi.html.

James Druckman and Jeremy Freese

Principal Investigators

1) 2013 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING (SJDM)

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for oral presentations, posters, and symposia* on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required. (*Please note that historically, symposium submissions have had substantially lower acceptance rates than individual paper submissions due to requirements for high integration and quality across all papers in the session. Authors who feel that a grouping of presentations is essential to communicating their research can submit a symposium with the knowledge that they are rarely accepted and that a subset of papers within the symposium might be accepted even if the whole symposium is rejected.)

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM

SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, during November 15-18, 2013. You may make reservations at $199 CAD per night (the Psychonomic convention rate). Early registration, a welcome reception, and a tribute to Duncan Luce will take place on the evening of Friday, November 15. The keynote address will be Sunday, November 17, with Susan Carey as the keynote speaker.

SUBMISSIONS

The deadline for submissions is June 17, 2013. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org/. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster, Jon Baron, at webmaster@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Robyn LeBoeuf, at robyn.leboeuf at warrington.ufl.edu.

ELIGIBILITY

At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. You may join SJDM at http://www.sjdm.org/jdm-member.html. An individual may give only one talk and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters. Please note that both the membership rule and the one-talk/ one-poster rule will be enforced.

AWARDS

The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM. The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due June 17, 2013. Further details are available here. Questions can be directed to the chair of the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Committee, Tim Pleskac, pleskact@msu.edu. The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM meeting. Further details will be available at http://www.sjdm.org.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Robyn LeBoeuf (Chair), Bernd Figner, Jack Soll, Katy Milkman, Ellie Kyung, Anuj Shah, Katherine Burson, Ana Franco-Watkins, and Mare Appleby (conference coordinator)

2) 2013 CALL FOR PAPERS: WORKSHOP ON CROWDSOURCING AND ONLINE BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS (COBE)

A workshop at the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Philadelphia, June 17, 2013.

Submission Deadline: April 26, 2013

Official Web Page: http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/cobe/

OVERVIEW

The World Wide Web has resulted in new and unanticipated avenues for conducting large-scale behavioral experiments. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, oDesk, and Taskcn, 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.

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and academics to present their latest online behavioral experiments.

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=cobe2013, 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 6 pages including references. Accepted papers will be presented as talks.

Deadline for submissions: April 26, 2013
Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2013

ORGANIZATION:

* Siddharth Suri, Microsoft Research
* Winter A. Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology
* Daniel G Goldstein, Microsoft Research

SOME DOCTORS GET COMPLAINED ABOUT MORE THAN OTHERS. SPECIALTY MATTERS.

One topic in medical decision making that most people can relate to is the problem of choosing a doctor, especially when moving to a new town in which one knows few people from whom to receive references. One way to look at the problem is choosing a doctor you will likely not want to complain about. The likelihood of a doctor getting complaints is somewhat predictable, as shown in this recent article in BMJ Quality and Safety, based on a sample of almost 19,000 complaints filed by patients in Australia.

ABSTRACT

Objectives (1) To determine the distribution of formal patient complaints across Australia’s medical workforce and (2) to identify characteristics of doctors at high risk of incurring recurrent complaints.

Methods We assembled a national sample of all 18 907 formal patient complaints filed against doctors with health service ombudsmen (‘Commissions’) in Australia over an 11-year period. We analysed the distribution of complaints among practicing doctors. We then used recurrent-event survival analysis to identify characteristics of doctors at high risk of recurrent complaints, and to estimate each individual doctor’s risk of incurring future complaints.

Results The distribution of complaints among doctors was highly skewed: 3% of Australia’s medical workforce accounted for 49% of complaints and 1% accounted for a quarter of complaints. Short-term risks of recurrence varied significantly among doctors: there was a strong dose-response relationship with number of previous complaints and significant differences by doctor specialty and sex. At the practitioner level, risks varied widely, from doctors with <10% risk of further complaints within 2 years to doctors with >80% risk.

Conclusions A small group of doctors accounts for half of all patient complaints lodged with Australian Commissions. It is feasible to predict which doctors are at high risk of incurring more complaints in the near future. Widespread use of this approach to identify high-risk doctors and target quality improvement efforts coupled with effective interventions, could help reduce adverse events and patient dissatisfaction in health systems.

Before jumping to the conclusion that there good and bad apples in the world, realize that things that have little to do with the doctor, such as specialty, play a role:

That is, regardless of the doctor, those seeking plastic surgery are much more likely to file complaints than others.

Interestingly, experience doesn’t seem to help. In fact, doctors under 35 are significantly less likely to generate complaints than those age 36 and over.

REFERENCE
M. M. Bismark, M. J. Spittal, L. C. Gurrin, M. Ward, D. M. Studdert. Identification of doctors at risk of recurrent complaints: a national study of healthcare complaints in Australia. BMJ Quality & Safety, 2013; DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs-2012-001691

Full text
Supplementary materials

MORE ON EXERCISE EQUIVALENTS VS CALORIE COUNTS ON MENUS

We’ve written before about exercise equivalents over calorie counts, citing some initial encouraging data. Now there are more data, also encouraging.

The new article is called Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals. These authors tested four variant menus “(1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories”. The authors found, as before that calorie counts decreased the amount of calories people chose to consume, and that exercise equivalents (telling you how much walking time or walking distance you’d need to burn off those calories) increased the effect.

We’d like to know the effect size of (3) vs (4) and are awaiting a full copy of the paper.

ABSTRACT

In this study we examined the effect of physical activity based labels on the calorie content of meals selected from a sample fast food menu. Using a web-based survey, participants were randomly assigned to one of four menus which differed only in their labeling schemes (n = 802): (1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories. There was a significant difference in the mean number of calories ordered based on menu type (p = 0.02), with an average of 1020 calories ordered from a menu with no nutritional information, 927 calories ordered from a menu with only calorie information, 916 calories ordered from a menu with both calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, and 826 calories ordered from the menu with calorie information and the number of miles to walk to burn those calories. The menu with calories and the number of miles to walk to burn those calories appeared the most effective in influencing the selection of lower calorie meals (p = 0.0007) when compared to the menu with no nutritional information provided. The majority of participants (82%) reported a preference for physical activity based menu labels over labels with calorie information alone and no nutritional information. Whether these labels are effective in real-life scenarios remains to be tested.

REFERENCE
Sunaina Dowray, Jonas J. Swartz, Danielle Braxton, Anthony J. Viera
Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals ☆
Appetite, Volume 62, 1 March 2013, Pages 173–181
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2012.11.013

THE LUCID PERCEPTION OF THE CROWD

This is one of the most amazing things we’ve seen all week. What does the text block above say? You have no idea, right?

The folks running the Deneme blog over at MIT gave this task to experimental participants in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labor market. By doing it in an iterative way, people were able to transcribe the blurry mess to English with only one mistake.

The iterative method is as follows:

* One person gives the transcription a try
* The next person sees the previous tries and tries to improve upon it
* Repeat until done

(We’re not sure if the workers can see all the previous attempts or just the last one).

This is what the iterative method came up with:

I had intended to hit the nail, but I’m not a very good aim it seems and I ended up hitting my thumb. This is a common occurence I know, but it doesn’t make me feel any less ridiculous having done it myself. My new strategy will involve lightly tapping the nail while holding it until it is embedded into the wood enough that the wood itself is holding it straight and then I’ll remove my hand and pound carefully away. We’ll see how this goes.

…and the only error was that ’embedded’ should have been ‘wedged’.

Remarkably, for the passage above, people got it. And in a non-iterative version, in which each person had no help from previous workers, everyone gave up. Details are here. That said in two other texts, neither the iterative or non-iterative method worked, but of course they only tried once per text.

We are curious to know how they’ve improved upon this very promising method.

P.S. We’ve found this task to be slightly easier when you scroll the blurry text up and down a bit in the browser. Try it on the full sized image on the original blog post.

P.P.S. When you iterate but only look at the last attempt (instead of the original plus the last attempts) things get worse, as in the game of telephone. Check out this cool example of how a straight line morphs into craziness by error propagation.

P.P.P.S. I remember my dad, a psychology professor, showing me results of a line copying experiment he did on his students at Carnegie Mellon in the 1970s. He passed a deck of index cards around the class. Each student looked at the image on the top of the deck, moved it to the bottom, and tried to reproduce it on the blank card on top, and then passed it on. The results were similarly crazy.

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

Just a reminder that the quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

IN ADDITION: The hot new workshop on Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments (COBE 2013) is now accepting submissions. For details, see:

http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/cobe/

Enjoy both!

Dan Goldstein
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

CALL FOR PAPERS

A workshop at the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Philadelphia, June 17, 2013.

Submission Deadline: April 26, 2013

Official Web Page: http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/cobe/

OVERVIEW

The World Wide Web has resulted in new and unanticipated avenues for conducting large-scale behavioral experiments. Crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, oDesk, and Taskcn, 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.

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and academics to present their latest online behavioral experiments.

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=cobe2013, 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 6 pages including references. Accepted papers will be presented as talks.

Deadline for submissions: April 26, 2013
Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2013

ORGANIZATION:

* Siddharth Suri, Microsoft Research
* Winter A. Mason, Stevens Institute of Technology
* Daniel G Goldstein, Microsoft Research

Program committee and invited speakers will be announced soon.