Decision Science News

Two posts ago we showed you the digit sound system for remembering numbers. This week we provide two computer programs to help you create mnemonics.

Decision Science News readers know about Hal Hershfield and Dan Goldstein’s experiments in which they exposed people to interactive images of their future self to see how it would impact their saving behavior (pictured above).
The idea was sent up in three Saturday Night Live fake commercials for Lincoln Financial. The SNL interactions with the future self were a lot more awkward than ours, but maybe that’s a good thing for changing behavior?

We would like to invite you, the members of your research group, and your colleagues to participate in The Second Social Learning Strategies Tournament, which we hope will interest you. The tournament, which has a total of 25,000 euro available as prize money, is now open for entries.

With this call for papers, we hope to attract manuscripts that are
outstanding empirical and/or theoretical exemplars of research on any health
related topic from a behavioral and/or experimental economic perspective. We
anticipate studies will focus on a range of topics, including, but not
limited to: Smoking, Dietary choices, Adherence to treatment, Decision
making, Risk taking behavior, Choice architecture, Information asymmetry and
use of monetary incentives to alter behavior. We expect papers to reflect a
variety of methodologies but to highlight implications of the research for
practitioners and policy makers.

Society for Judgment and Decision Making Newsletter Editor Dan Goldstein reports that the final SJDM newsletter of 2010 is ready for download.

ON COMMITMENT DEVICE BUSINESSES AND SOFT CONTRACTS This week, our former home, the Center for the Decision Sciences at Columbia University, has turned us on to this article about a fitness plan that charges you more if you work out less. Yes, it’s a business putting applied behavioral economics to work, not unlike Stickk.com or [...]

APPLICATIONS NOW ACCEPTED FOR JUNE 21-28, 2011 SUMMER SCHOOL IN BERLIN Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory 21 – 28 June, 2011 Directed by Gerd Gigerenzer Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany It is our pleasure to announce the Summer Institute on [...]

BUSINESS SCHOOLS RESPOND TO DEMAND FOR USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Advertising has changed a bit since the early 1960s Today the New York Times / International Herald Tribune ran a piece on teaching social media marketing in business schools entitled Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media. The courses of your Decision [...]

MAX PLANCK SUMMER INSTITUTE ON BOUNDED RATIONALITY This week, Decision Science News brings you a summer school and a few spring workshops. The summer school is the one at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, brought to you by Gerd Gigerenzer and Nobel laureate Smith and will feature a lecture by Ariel Rubenstein. Now, those [...]

MISPLACED SYMPATHY Decision Science News knows that when faculty from London Business School travel abroad, they are frequently asked “how are things at the London School of Economics?” When the London Business School faculty members say politely that they are at LBS and not LSE, the askers suddenly look sympathetic, as if they’d inquired about [...]