Decision Science News

2006 AMA WINTER EDUCATORS’ CONFERENCE

February 17 – February 20, 2006

Tradewinds Resort St. Petersburg, FL

Conference Chairs:

Jean L. Johnson, Washington State University
John Hulland, University of Pittsburgh

Conference registration not yet available. Check here or here

2006 AMA SUMMER EDUCATORS’ CONFERENCE

August 4 – August 7, 2006

Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Chicago, IL

Conference Co-Chairs:

Dhruv Grewal, Babson College
Michael Levy, Babson College
R. Krishnan, University of Miami

Paper and Proposal Deadline: January 9, 2006

Full Call for Papers and Updates

The annual Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best book in marketing recognizes innovative ideas and impact on marketing and related fields. It is named in honor of the generous contributions of Leonard L. Berry, distinguished author and professor, and his wife Nancy F. Berry to the American Marketing Association (AMA) Foundation.

The 2005 Berry/AMA Book Prize finalists are:

Accountable Marketing : The Economics of Data-Driven Marketing (Thomson Texere), by Peter Rosenwald

Effective Advertising : Understanding When, How, and Why Advertising Works (Marketing for a New Century) (Sage Publications), by Gerard J. Tellis

Marketing and the Bottom Line, Second Edition (Prentice Hall, Pearson Education), by Tim Ambler

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable(Penguin Group), by Seth Godin

Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most (Harvard Business School), by Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan

Tenure-track positions in social psychology are available at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, invites applications for a tenure-track position in social psychology beginning August 2006. The department anticipates hiring at the assistant professor level. The University of Colorado, Boulder, is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment. In that spirit, applications at all levels will be considered from those who would strengthen the department’s diversity.

Candidates in any area of social psychology will be considered. In particular, we are interested in those who can contribute to the existing strengths of the program; these include social psychological approaches to health, judgment and decision making, social neuroscience, and social cognition. Special consideration will be given to candidates who can also contribute to our strengths in statistics and research methods. The successful candidate will be expected to teach at the graduate and undergraduate levels, to supervise undergraduate and graduate students in research, and to maintain an active research program. Salary is competitive and dependent upon experience.

All applicants should send a curriculum vitae, a statement of research interests, a statement of undergraduate and graduate teaching interests, representative research papers, and at least three letters of recommendation to: Charles M. Judd, Chair, Social Search Committee, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0345. We will begin reviewing applications November 15, 2005 and will continue to review applications until the position is filled.

FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS: THE HIDDEN ROLE OF CHANCE IN THE MARKETS AND IN LIFE

Nassim Nicholas Taleb does it all, he’s a successful trader, author, and academic. His book Fooled by Randomness is soon to come out in paperback, and draws on sources from Finance to Literature to address the role of chance in life.

FLAP:

“The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: Yogi Berra, the baseball legend; Karl Popper, the philosopher knowledge; Solon, the Ancient World’s wisest man; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Ulysses. In addition we meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his life, but who also falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness. But the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed: the lucky fool in the right place at the right time. The embodiment of the survival of the least fit. Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru’s insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained through chance. A monkey banging on the keyboard may eventually produce the Iliad, but would you sign him to write the sequel?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Academic & Teaching:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a fellow in Mathematics in Finance and an adjunct Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Taleb is also a visiting Professor of Risk Management at the Université Paris-Dauphine.

Selected Publications:

(2004). “Blowup” versus “Bleed”: What Does Empirical Psychology Say About the Preference For Negative Skewness? Journal of Behavioral Finance, 5, 1.

(2005). Roots of Unfairness. Journal of the International Comparative Literature Association: Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire 21.41-42.

(2005). On the Risk of the Unforecastable and its Perception”, in Preventing Genocide: A Handbook for Foreign Policy Professionals, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Publications.

Quote:

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page

AMA MARKETING JOB MARKET INTERVIEWS: ONE YEAR LATER

Again, the AMA interviews, inspiration of this DSN piece, have come and gone for another year. To the students on the market: How was your experience? What worked and what didn’t work? Mail your comments (anonymous or nonymous, just let me know) to dan at dangoldstein dot com and we will publish tips for next year here.

DECISION SCIENCE RESEARCHER PROFILE: AMOS TVERSKY

Amos Tversky (March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was one of the leading Psychologists of the 20th century, best known for the research program he advanced, in collaboration with Daniel Kahneman, generally known as the Heuristics and Biases program. It is thought that if Tversky were alive when Kahneman recently won the Nobel prize, he would have won as well.

“With Kahneman, he originated Prospect Theory to explain irrational human economic choices. Kahneman and Tversky pioneered the field of behavioral economics. In developing […] “prospect theory,” the psychologists argued that people are not as calculating as economic models assume. Instead, they said, people repeatedly make errors in judgment that can be predicted and categorized. A 1979 paper they wrote on the subject in Econometrica is one of the most widely cited papers in economics. As a statement by the Grawemeyer Award committee noted, “It is difficult to identify a more influential idea than that of Kahneman and Tversky in the human sciences.” (from Stanford University News Service)

“Tversky’s most important papers, many of which were written with […] Daniel Kahneman, were unique in their depth and in the breadth of their impact. Through a combination of carefully wrought experiments, elegant formalizations, and an uncanny ability to draw upon everyday experience, they offered compelling accounts of processes and shortcomings that characterize human judgment and decision making. Amos’ work already has exerted a major impact not only on virtually every sub-discipline of psychology, but also in statistics, law, medicine, business, and other fields in which decision makers must weigh costs and benefits in the face of uncertainty. The decision of litigants pondering whether to settle or go to court, engineers weighing safety measures, and young couples considering whether to invest in a trip to Paris or the down payment on a car can be understood (and often could have been made wiser) through his theorizing and research.

It is the science of economics, however, in which Tversky’s and Kahneman’s ultimate influence is likely to be most lasting and profound. Most economic analysis presupposes the rationality of actors’ decisions and of the judgments and predictions upon which those decisions are based. Tversky and Kahneman challenged such presumptions. They demonstrated that very small risks are given disproportionate weight, that prospective losses and gains are not treated symmetrically, that the presence or absence of non-selected alternatives can reverse preference orderings, and that the manner in which options are semantically or mathematically “framed” can exert undue influence on decision makers. These violations of normative standards, in turn, are apt to distort private decisions and public policy alike.

Although [Tversky’s] best known work was contained in his papers on the heuristics of judgment and on sources of suboptimal decision making, Amos also made major contributions to many other areas of psychology, from the foundations of measurement to the nature of similarity assessment and the misperception of randomness or chance. As always, counterintuitive experimental results were his hallmark. In one notable paper, he illustrated that people judge similarity asymmetrically; for example, they regard Tel Aviv to be more like New York than vice versa (a powerful demonstration of the inadequacies of Euclidean metric models of stimulus presentation). In another instantly famous paper he confounded basketball experts by showing that the so-called “hot-hand” was an illusion, that successive “hits” and “misses” by NBA players did not cluster together more than expected by the dictates of chance. In yet another memorable study with Kahneman, he showed that Stanford undergraduates, guided by their reliance upon assessments of similarity or “representativeness” judged the likelihood that an outspoken young liberal named “Linda” (described to them in a brief paragraph) was a “feminist bank teller” to be greater than the likelihood simply that she was a bank teller, thereby violating a basic tenet of formal logic. Focusing again and again on the gap between actual human intellectual performance and the normative standards that should seemingly govern such performance, Amos produced at least a dozen papers that, even by his own stringent standards, can justifiably be termed classics.” (from Stanford University Memorial Resolution)

Tversky received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1965, and later taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before moving to Stanford University. In 1984 he was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. In 1984 he was also presented the Guggenheim Fellowship.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Kahneman, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; Tversky, Amos. (1982) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, Daniel; Tversky, Amos. (2000) Choices, values, and frames New York: Cambridge University Press.

Coombs, Clyde H.; Dawes, Robyn M.; Tversky, Amos. (1970) Mathematical psychology: An elementary introduction Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

ENTRY-LEVEL TENURE-TRACK POSITIONS AVAILABLE AT LONDON BUSSINESS SCHOOL.

The Marketing Group at London Business School is looking for outstanding candidates for an entry-level tenure-track position starting summer/autumn 2006. They will be interviewing at the American Marketing Association AMA conference in San Francisco.

They are looking for bright, well-trained, energetic, intellectually curious candidates with evidence of high research potential and teaching ability, and enthusiastic to work in London. Specific research and teaching interests are less important than the candidate’s calibre and cultural fit with the group.

Applications – CV and recommendation letter(s), plus 1-2 working papers or journal articles – should be sent, preferably electronically, to Nader Tavassoli: ntavassoli at london dot edu

NEURAL CORRELATES OF BEHAVIORAL PREFERENCE FOR CULTURALLY FAMILIAR DRINKS

Are preferences for culturally familiar drinks such as Coke or Pepsi based solely on the taste or are there other factors involved? A recent article in Neuron discusses how cultural messages may be more influential than taste in the development of such preferences.

ABSTRACT

“Coca-Cola_ (Coke_) and Pepsi_ are nearly identical in chemical composition, yet humans routinely display strong subjective preferences for one or the other. This simple observation raises the important question of how cultural messages combine with content to shape our perceptions; even to the point of modifying behavioral preferences for a primary reward like a sugared drink. We delivered Coke and Pepsi to human subjects in behavioral taste tests and also in passive experiments carried out during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Two conditions were examined: (1) anonymous delivery of Coke and Pepsi and (2) brand-cued delivery of Coke and Pepsi. For the anonymous task, we report a consistent neural response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that correlated with subjects’ behavioral preferences for these beverages. In the brand-cued experiment, brand knowledge for one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses.”

QUOTES

“Cultural influences on our behavioral preferences for food and drink are now intertwined with the biological expediency that shaped the early version of the underlying preference mechanisms. In many cases, cultural influences dominate what we eat and drink. Behavioral evidence suggests that cultural messages can insinuate them-selves into the decision-making processes that yield preferences for one consumable or another. Consequently, the appeal or repulsion of culturally relevant sights, sounds, and their associated memories all contribute to the modern construction of food and drink preferences.”

“These two stimuli [Coke and Pepsi,] were chosen for three reasons. (1) They are culturally familiar to subjects. (2) They are both primarily composed of brown, carbonated sugar water, and sugar water serves as a primary reward in many animal and human experiments. (3) Despite their similarities, they generate a large subjective preference difference across human subjects, which might correlate with fMRI-measured brain responses. We pursued three primary questions using the experiments presented in this paper. (1) What is the behavioral and neural response to these drinks when presented anonymously? (2) What is the behavioral and neural influence of knowledge about which drink is being consumed? (3) In questions1 and 2, is there a correlation between the expressed behavioral preference and the neural response as measured using fMRI?”

“The medical importance of understanding these questions is straightforward—there is literally a growing crisis in obesity, type II diabetes, and all their sequelae that result directly from or are exacerbated by over consumption of calories (for recent work see Chacko et al., 2003; Ford et al., 2003; Wyatt, 2003; Zimmet, 2003; Popkin and Nielsen, 2003). It is now strongly suspected that one major culprit is sugared colas (Popkin and Nielsen, 2003).”

“Most real-world settings present numerous primary sensations and top-down influences that act to organize a coherent behavioral preference. Studies have indeed shown that cultural information can modulate reward-related brain response (Erk et al., 2002). 2002). This general observation is particularly true for Coke and Pepsi; that is, there are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks. It is possible that these cultural messages perturb taste perception.”

ABOUT THE FIRST AUTHOR

Samuel M. McClure

Samuel M. McClure is a psychology postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He received his PhD in neuroscience in 2003 from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “Broadly, my research lies in the area of reward processing. I am interested in how we respond to motivationally salient events, learn to predict them, and translate this knowledge into decisions to act. My work has focused on appetitive salient events, or rewards, and how they drive changes in neural activity in the basal ganglia and midbrain dopamine systems. These systems have long been associated with reward processing in the brain, but recently a new hypothesis has emerged which relates activity in these systems to artificial intelligence learning algorithms. The theory states that the dopamine systems calculate error in the prediction of reward that is then propagated as learning signals to the basal ganglia. Further, the basal ganglia are believed to use these signals to improve our decision making in the future.” –from Samuel M. McClure’s homepage

Jian Li

Jian Li is a PhD candidate at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He received his B.S. from Nanjing University in Nanjing, China. – from Jian Li’s curriculum vitae

Damon Tomlin

Damon Tomlin is a graduate student in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He received his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2001 from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. –from the Baylor College of Medicine researcher profile

Kim S. Cypert & Latane M. Montague

Kim S. Cypert & Latane M. Montague are two people we can find little about, but we do know that Latane is Read’s daughter.

Read Montague

Dr. Read Montague is a Professor in the Division of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, Director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab, and Director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. His work focuses on computational neuroscience – the connection between the physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. -from the Baylor College of Medicine Human Neuroimaging Lab

27TH SOCIETY FOR MEDICAL DECISION MAKING ANNUAL MEETING

We are pleased to invite you to submit an abstract and attend the 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).

This year’s meeting will take place from October 21-24, 2005 in San Francisco, CA. The meeting hotel is the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

The theme of the 2005 meeting will be Translating Medical Decision Making Research into Practice. We plan to highlight the ways in which decision science – ranging from decision analysis, clinical decision aids, cost-effectiveness analysis, and clinical modeling – is translated into clinical care and health system operations. We encourage submission of abstracts in all relevant areas, with a particular emphasis on this year’s theme of translating knowledge into practice. As we will have an overlapping session with the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) , we are also interested in abstracts of interest to members of both societies. Reviewers representing a range of disciplines, who are blind to authorship, will select abstracts for all oral and poster presentations.

This year’s meeting is different in several exciting ways – first, ISOQOL will be having their annual meeting immediately preceding the SMDM meeting also at the Hyatt. We hope many of our members decide to come a day or two early and participate in the ISOQOL meeting – and are looking forward to having some ISOQOL members stay a little longer to see what SMDM is all about! In addition, on Saturday October 22nd our opening session will be a joint session with the ISOQOL attendees. We plan to highlight abstracts from both societies which explore the scientific overlap of SMDM and ISOQOL and will end the session with a joint poster session and reception.

Second, because this year our meeting is on the west coast, and given our overlap with the ISOQOL meeting, we will be starting the short courses on Friday afternoon (allowing our east coast members time to fly in that morning) and ending with a full day on Monday the 24th. Our short courses will therefore be on the afternoon of Friday October 21st and Saturday morning the 22nd. As usual, the short courses will address the methodologies and applications that span the broad spectrum of interests reflected in the Society. New courses offered this year include: Changing Physician Behavior, and Presenting Cost Effectiveness Results for Non Economists, as well as a special course by ISOQOL member John E. Ware PhD on Dynamic Health Assessments.

This year’s meeting will feature two special symposia: one focusing on priorities in patient decision making research, and the other looking at how to effectively communicate our research to our consumers. The Sunday symposium is entitled Translating Research into Practice: Setting a Research Agenda for Clinical Decision Tools in Cancer Prevention, Early Detection, and Treatment and will feature Ellen Peters PhD of the University of Oregon, E Dale Collins MD, MSc and Hilary Llewellyn-Thomas, PhD from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and Laura Siminoff PhD of Case Western Reserve University. The Monday symposium is entitled The Risky Business of Communicating Risk and will focus on effective ways of communicating methodologically and socially difficult material to the public, patients, physicians, and policy makers. This symposium will feature Howard Spielman, MBA, PhD of Management Semiotics International Inc, Steve Denning, LL.B, B.C.L. previously of the World Bank, and Baruch Fischhoff, PhD of Carnegie Mellon University.

For our social event we will be spending Sunday evening at the Bubble Lounge – a lovely establishment whose high ceilings, dark wood, and many areas of comfy couches and low tables will be the ideal back drop for great food and lively conversation. In addition, the program committee has put together a website full of information about San Francisco and things for you to do while you’re visiting. We hope that it will help you plan your trip to this lovely city.

Again, this year’s SMDM abstract submission process will be fully electronic. Complete instructions and the online form can be accessed on the SMDM website here. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 11:59 midnight PST on June 10, 2005. Full text of accepted abstracts will appear in the November-December issue of our bi-monthly journal Medical Decision Making. In a subsequent mailing, you will receive an Annual Meeting overview, short course description, hotel and travel information about San Francisco and our social event, and a meeting registration form. The 27th SMDM Annual Meeting will provide a great opportunity to hear about cutting-edge research across a spectrum of disciplines with good friends in a friendly and supportive atmosphere.

We look forward to your submissions, and we’ll see you in San Francisco!

Sincerely,

Gillian D Sanders, PhD and Dena M. Bravata, MD, MS
2005 Program Co-Chairs

FACULTY MARKETING POSITIONS ARE AVAILABLE AT DUKE UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AND THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

1.
DUKE UNIVERSITY – THE FUQUA SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – Durham, North Carolina

Duke University has openings for marketing faculty at all ranks in the Fuqua School of Business beginning fall 2006. Emphasis will be placed on an individual’s actual or potential for research excellence and impact. The Fuqua School of Business is a top-ranked, highly innovative, global business school; Duke University is regarded as one of the nation’s finest. The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area has been highly rated as a living environment. The presence of several major universities and the Research Triangle Park helps to provide an outstanding combination of exceptional lifestyle, vibrant business community, and an extensive set of cultural, academic, and leisure opportunities.

Send resume to:

Professor Wagner A. Kamakura
The Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Box 90120
Durham, NC 27708-0120
Tel (919) 660-7855
Fax (919) 681-6245

Duke University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

2.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA – THE MOORE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – Columbia, South Carolina

The Moore School of Business at The University of South Carolina invites applications for tenure-track positions in Marketing at the rank of new assistant professor, advanced assistant professor, or associate professor beginning August 2006. Eligible candidates must have a Ph.D. in marketing or related field by the date of appointment. Preferred candidates for the new assistant professor position(s) will evidence sophisticated research capability in a well-defined area of marketing leading to sustained publications in top journals and potential for high-quality instruction at undergraduate, MBA, and Ph.D. levels. Preferred candidates for the advanced assistant and associate professor position(s) must have established records of publications in the top marketing journals along with evidence of high-quality teaching and capability of immediately teaching MBA courses. We are seeking applicants with areas of specialization in consumer behavior, marketing strategy, and marketing modeling.

Please send applications to:

Professor Terence A. Shimp, Chair, The Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208

Representatives from the Marketing Department will conduct interviews at the forthcoming AMA Summer Educators’ Conference in San Francisco, July 28 – August 1, 2005. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. The University of South Carolina is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. For more information about the Moore School of Business and the marketing faculty, please visit our web site at http://mooreschool.sc.edu.

3.
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA – Iowa City, Iowa

The University of Iowa invites the submission of resumes from qualified candidates for one or more anticipated faculty positions in marketing at the rank of lecturer, regular or visiting; assistant, associate or full professor, either tenure-track or visiting. We are particularly seeking individuals with research interests in marketing models or marketing strategy, but will consider all areas in marketing.

Assistant-level candidates should have a completed or nearly completed dissertation and clearly exhibit high potential for scholarly research and effective teaching. Candidates with an established record of excellence in published scholarly research and quality teaching will be considered for positions at the rank of associate or full professor.

Iowa City, which hosts the University, is a desirable place to live. The schools, medical services, quality of the community and reasonable real estate values combine to provide substantial benefits for faculty members. The University is a state-supported school of about 27,000 students. Of those, over 15,000 are enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts. This gives the campus and campus life a distinct cultural flavor which makes the environment quite stimulating.

Send curriculum vitae to:

Professor Cathy Cole, Chair, Department of Marketing
Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa
108 Pappajohn Business Bldg.
Iowa City, IA 52242-1000

or via e-mail

business-college-marketing@uiowa.edu.

When submitting resumes, please specify whether application is for tenure-track, visiting or lecturer position. The University of Iowa is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Employer. Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are enthusiastically encouraged to apply.