Welcome
The EBDM seminar presents behavioural economics and decision-making research to academic community of London. Seminars (except where noted) are Tuesday evenings at 17:30 and are open to the public.
EBDM Seminar: Arthur Robson presents “The Evolutionary Optimality of Decision and Experienced Utilities”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “The Evolutionary Optimality of Decision and Experienced Utilities” by Arthur Robson (Simon Fraser University)
Tuesday May 26, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of “decision utilities” that routinely overestimate the “experienced utility” consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design problem. We examine a setting in which evolution designs agents with utility functions that must mediate intertemporal tradeoffs, in the presence of an incentive to condition current utilities on the information implicitly contained in the agent’s previous experience. These forces conflict, in the sense that anticipating future utility adjustments can distort intertemporal incentives, a conflict that can be attenuated by separating decision and experience utilities.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Daniele Paserman presents “Gender Interactions within Hierarchies: Evidence from the Political Arena”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Gender Interactions within Hierarchies: Evidence from the Political Arena” by Daniele Paserman (Boston U)
Tuesday April 21, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h00-18h30 (Note the change in time schedule)
Abstract
This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy (a team with a well defined ranking of its members), whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks. Specifically, the mayor can be forced to resign by a simple no-confidence vote in the council. Hence, the executive’s survival in office should depend on the ability of the chief to foster cooperation among the coalition, and on the individual propensity of the councillors to be cooperative.
We find that in municipalities headed by female mayors, the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher. This result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as non-random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender-mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin. The likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male, and in regions with less favorable attitudes towards working women. The evidence is suggestive that female mayors are less able at fostering cooperation among men, or alternatively, that men are more reluctant to be headed by women. Other interpretations receive less support in the data. Our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Drazen Prelec presents “Bayesian truth serum”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Bayesian truth serum” by Drazen Prelec (MIT)
Tuesday April 14, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
Subjective judgments are an essential but problematic information source for science and policy — problematic, because there are no public criteria for assessing judgmental truthfulness. I present a scoring method for eliciting truthful subjective data in situations where objective truth is unknowable. The method assigns high scores, not to the most common answers, but to answers that are more common than collectively predicted, with predictions drawn from the same population. This simple adjustment in the scoring criterion removes all bias in favor of consensus: Truthful answers maximize expected score even for respondents who believe that their answer represents a minority view.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Jean Marc Tallon presents “An experimental investigation of imprecision attitude and its relation with risk attitude and impatience”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “An experimental investigation of imprecision attitude and its relation with risk attitude and impatience” by Jean Marc Tallon (PSE)
Tuesday April 7, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
We report in this paper the result of three experiments on risk, ambiguity and time attitude. The first two differed by the population considered (students vs. general population) while the third one used a different protocol and concerned students and portfolio managers. We find quite a lot of heterogeneity at the individual level. Of principal interest was the elicitation of risk, time and ambiguity attitudes and the relationship among these (model free) measures. We find that on the student population, there is essentially no correlation. A non negligible fraction of the population behaves in an extremely cautious manner in the risk and ambiguity domain. When we drop this population from the sample, the correlation between our measures is also non significant. We also report findings three puzzles that come out from our data sets.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Graham Loomes presents “Modelling Noise and Imprecision in Individual Decisions”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Modelling Noise and Imprecision in Individual Decisions” by Graham Loomes (UEA)
Tuesday March 31, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
When individuals take part in decision experiments, their answers are typically subject to some degree of noise / error / imprecision. There are different ways of modelling this stochastic element in the data, and the interpretation of the data can be altered radically, depending on the assumptions made about the stochastic specification. This paper presents the results of an experiment which gathered data of a kind that has until now been in short supply. These data strongly suggest that the ‘usual’ (Fechnerian) assumptions about errors are inappropriate for individual decision experiments. Moreover, they provide striking evidence that core preferences display systematic departures from transitivity which cannot be attributed to any ‘error’ story.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: John Coates presents “Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor” by John Coates (Cambridge)
Tuesday March 24, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking. Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader’s ability to engage in rational choice.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Steffen Huck presents “Field Experiments on Fundraising”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Field Experiments on Fundraising” by Steffen Huck (UCL)
Tuesday March 17, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on whether individual behavior is consistent with a neoclassical model of utility maximization subject to budget constraints. We do this through the lens of a field experiment on charitable giving. In conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera House, we mailed 25,000 regular opera attendees a letter describing a charitable fundraising project organized by the opera house. Recipients were randomly assigned into one of five treatments designed to provide ten tests of revealed preference theory. We find that the behavior of at least 80% of individuals, on both the extensive and intensive margins, can be rationalized within a standard neoclassical choice model in which individuals have preferences defined over own consumption and their contribution towards the charitable good, and their preferences satisfy the axioms of revealed preference. The analysis highlights that in a real world environment in which individuals make simple decisions they are familiar with, standard microeconomic theory works well in explaining observed individual choices.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Erik Eyster presents “Naive Herding”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Naive Herding” by Erik Eyster (LSE)
Tuesday March 10th, 2009
Location: London Business School - Lecture Theatre 5
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
In a social-learning environment, we investigate implications of the assumption that players naively believe that a previous player’s actions reflect solely that player’s private information. This error leads players to inadvertently over-weight early players’ private signals by neglecting that interim players’ actions also embed these signals. Consequently, naive players can become extremely and wrongly confident about the state even where rational players never become confident, and may herd on incorrect actions even where rational players never do. Wrong herding can happen when naive players observe no more than two previous actions and also when other players are rational or under-infer.
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
EBDM Seminar: Rosemarie Nagel presents “Choice overload and neural signals of choice-set value from fMRI”
The Economics of Behaviour and Decision-Making Seminar invites you to: “Choice overload and neural signals of choice-set value from fMRI” by Rosemarie Nagel (Pompeu Fabra)
Tuesday March 3rd, 2009
Location: Westminster Business School seminar room MR2
Time: 17h30-19h00
Abstract
Whereas classical economics argues that more choice is always beneficial, recent studies indicate that large choice sets can be demotivating and lead to “choice paralysis”. We investigate the neural bases of human decision making when people are confronted with N=6, 12 or 24 items using fMRI. Subjects faced different-sized choice sets of landscape photographs; one choice was actually used to produce a consumer product of their choice
using the photograph (e.g. T-shirt). Subjects generally rated the smaller set as having too few items and the largest set as having too many (i.e. choice set quality is an inverted Ushaped function of N). All said choosing from the large set was more difficult. Brain areas increasing in difficulty included the cingulate and dorsal premotor. Brain areas increasing in set quality included superior parietal cortex (SPL, an area known to respond in monkeys and humans to value). A choice set with a highly-preferred item activated putamen (a reward area). These patterns show the first neural evidence of how the brain seems to combinethe quality of choices from a set with the difficulty of making choice into a signal that can be interpreted as the utility of a set (which is not monotonically increasing in set size).
How To Join The Email List
To subscribe to the seminar series email list, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yvw2sr to opt in. You can easily unsubscribe anytime. Please pass this message on to those who may be interested in joining the email list.
The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/
Sincerely,
Lionel Page (Westminster Business School)
Dan Goldstein (London Business School)
Emre Ozdenoren (London Business School)
A Related Talk Series in London
If you like decision-making, you will like the London Judgment and Decision Making Group Seminar.
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