Decision Science News

New York has, in the last years, joined the list of cities that require calorie counts to be posted on the menus of chain restaurants. Early research suggests that the labeling is not terribly effective.

At Decision Science News, we have all kinds of numbers memorized: IP addresses, passport numbers, phone numbers, bank account numbers, logarithms, etc. Once you have stuff like this memorized, you’ll start to realize how much less of a hassle it is to have things in memory rather than on paper or disk. Besides, it’s fun.

But how is it done?

It is done with the digit-sound method, which we learned from Professor Jaap Murre’s neuroMod site at the University of Amsterdam.

Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues surveyed Mundurucu participants (in the Amazon) and Western participants (in the USA) on where they felts numbers lie on a scale from from 10-100. Specifically, participants had an interface like that pictured above, with 10 dots on the left and 100 dots on the right. They were then shown between 10 and 100 dots and asked to click on the line where they would fall.

This week, two fun Econ-Finance papers. First is Steven Levitt and Thomas Miles’ analysis of whether poker is a game of skill. Next the famous Fama-French duo ask the same question of mutual fund management.

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.

Most inventions fail to be commercialized profitably. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to predict which ones will? This paper, by Astebro and Elhedhli argues that a simple rule can do quite well making forecasts in a difficult real-world setting.

The journal Judgment and Decision Making today published the third special issue on “Recognition processes in inferential decision making (III)” edited by Julian N. Marewski, Rüdiger F. Pohl and Oliver Vitouch. All the articles address the recognition heuristic [Goldstein, D. G. & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90.]

This week the reader is directed to Messy Matters to read up on research conducted by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Dan Goldstein in which they hunted for traces of “viral” diffusion on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, and beyond. The results run counter to mainstream intuition.