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 [...]
COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBLEM, INTUITIVE REPRESENTATION Blog posts about counterintuitive probability problems generate lots of opinions with a high probability. Andrew Gelman and readers have been having a lot of fun with the following probability problem: I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys? The [...]
INCREDIBLY SIMPLE CALCULATIONS MADE SIMPLE Yes, we all know how to calculate 15% or 20% exactly, but it’s fun to use tipping heuristics and even more fun to make crowded graphs of how they compare to each other. (Sorry for the junky chart. Open for suggestions, in the words of Tom Waits.) Here are a [...]
A PEPPERY COMMITMENT DEVICE Decision Science News was having dinner with Shlomo Benartzi recently, not far from his beloved Four Seasons Hotel in New York. At the end of the meal, a chocolate souffle was ordered. Halfway through the souffle, Benartzi asked “would you like any more of this?” Decision Science News declined and watched [...]
THE TECHNICAL DETAILS, TUTORIALS, WALK-THROUGHS A few posts back, we showed how classic decision making experiments are being replicated on Amazon’s insta-subject-pool otherwise know as Mechanical Turk (aka MT). After that, Steven Pinker, at the SJDM keynote, presented Mechanical-Turk-collected data on perceptions of whether the past or present is perceived as more violent. This week, [...]
A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF EXPERIMENTS NOW POSSIBLE Gabriele Paolacci sends along the following announcement. Decision Science News is also a fan of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (or mturk as we insiders call it), and it and its colleagues at Yahoo! Research are actively using with the evolving methodology. You are probably aware of the growing [...]
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