Decision Science News

The housing bubble by city. Miami sailed high and fell far. Detroit rose modestly and but dropped more than it went up. Dallas held steady. DC is enjoying a bit of renewed growth, but are in and New York yet to fall?

RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the four questions. The correct answers [...]

HOW TO DISPLAY A LINE PLOT WITH COUNT INFORMATION? In a previously-mentioned paper Sharad and your DSN editor are writing up, there is the above line plot with points. The area of each point shows the count of observations. It’s done in R with ggplot2 (hooray for Hadley). We generally like this type of plot, [...]

TYPES OF DEFAULTS AND HOW TO SET THEM Defaults are settings or choices that apply to individuals who do not take active steps to change them (Brown & Krishna, 2004). Collections of default settings, or “default configurations” determine the way products, services, or policies are initially encountered by consumers, while “reuse defaults” come into play [...]

HOMOPHILY + MAPS WITHOUT MAPPING SOFTWARE In the past, Decision Science News has posted about homophily (“birds of a feather shop together“) and cool, lightweight visualizations (“maps without map packages in R“). Today, both topics come together in Eric Fischer’s fascinating set of images on Flickr called “Race and Ethnicity”(*).  According to Eric: Red is [...]

THE POTENTIAL FOR A BOND BUBBLE Small investors have been a lot of fun to watch for quite some time now. In the 1930s, doing the opposite of the small investors (the so-called “odd lot” crowd because they could not afford to trade in amounts as large as standard units) was a popular contrarian strategy. [...]

PREDICTING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR FROM SOCIAL NETWORKS This week, Decision Science News is doing a special cross-posting with Messy Matters. The post below is by Sharad Goel and describes work that he and your Decision Science News editor Dan Goldstein are jointly undertaking at Yahoo! Do you know what the #$*! your social media strategy is? [...]

CHART CRITICS, GRAPHICS CURMUDGEONS, COME ONE COME ALL Once upon a time there was this graph (graph 1). Andrew Gelman went all graphics curmudgeon on it, calling it an “ugly, sloppy bit of data graphics“, so it became this graph (graph 2). Now the question is, which is better: graph 2 or graph 3? Please [...]

WHAT IF YOUR GPS TOLD YOU WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HAD TAKEN THE OTHER ROUTE? Not long ago, your Decision Science News editor was planning a trip to a book group meeting along with another member. The monthly book group takes place in Cove Neck Long Island, about an hour East of Manhattan. [...]

SMARTPHONE UPLOADED PHOTOS AND VIDEOS REVEAL YOUR LOCATION BY DEFAULT It wouldn’t be 2010 if people didn’t love going out, taking pictures with their iPhones and Blackberries and posting them online. It is not only a great way let your friends know what you are up to, it is a great way to unknowingly reveal [...]