Decision Science News

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 few tipping heuristics compared to a 15% baseline (which some claim to be 15-20% in NYC):

– Round to the nearest $10, then double the number on the left

– Round to the nearest $5 and throw in $1 for every $5

– Double the tax

There is also the notorious “double the number on the left”, which a friend’s father described as “sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.” DSN doesn’t like this one as it inflicts its damage on small checks, which often require as much waitstaff effort as large ones. If you’re a high roller, it looks pretty safe, however.

Whatever you do, please advocate smart heuristics instead of those undeservedly popular iPhone tipping apps.

What tipping rule of thumb do you use?

Note: Tax figure is New York City restaurant tax, which is something like 8.875%. I regret doing this in Excel instead of R, but it seemed like it would be faster and prettier.

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMA INTERVIEWS (2010 edition)

PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics are now gearing up to get their “packets” ready to mail out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
I’ve seen the Marketing job market turn happy grad students into quivering masses of fear. I want to share experiences that I and others have contributed, and provide a bit advice to make the whole process less mysterious.

WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO ME?
I’ve been on the AMA job market twice (mid 2000s), the Psychology market once (late 90s). As a professor I’ve conducted 20 AMA interviews and been a part of dozens of hiring decisions. I’ve been on the candidate end of about 40 AMA interviews, and experienced numerous campus visits, face-to-face interviews, offers, and rejections. I’m an outsider to Marketing who went on the market older and with more experience than the average rookie (35 years of age, with 8 years of research scientist, postdoc, visiting scholar, and industry positions). I’ve hired many people for many academic posts, so I know both sides.

HOW TO GET INTO THE AMA JOB MARKET
First, at least a couple months before the conference, find where it will be. It’s called the American Marketing Association Summer Educator’s Conference. Strange name, I know. Insiders just call it “The AMA”. Get yourself a room in the conference hotel, preferably on the floor where the express elevator meets the local elevator for the upper floors. You’ll be hanging out on this floor waiting to change elevators anyway, so you might as well start there.

Next, get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA. It helps if this person is in Marketing. Get 1 or 2 other letters of recommendation, a CV, and some choice pubs. Put them in an envelope and mail them out to a friend of your sponsor at the desired school. It should look like the letter is coming from your sponsor, even though you are doing the actual assembly and mailing. Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized. Certainly send one to the recruiting coordinator (you might find their name on hiring announcements, which are often sent to your home department’s secretary) and one to your sponsor’s friend. Mail to schools regardless of whether they are advertising a position or not. This is academia: nobody knows anything. This means you may be sending 50 or more packets. You want to have them mailed by the 4^th of July at the absolute latest.

THEN WHAT?
Wait to get calls or emails from schools wishing to set up AMA interviews with you. These calls may come in as late as one week before the conference. Often they come when you are sitting outside having a drink with friends. Some schools will not invite you for totally unknown reasons. You may get interviews from the top 10 schools and rejected from the 30th-ranked one. Don’t sweat it. Again, this is the land of total and absolute unpredictability that you’re entering into. Also, know that just because you get an interview doesn’t mean they have a job. Sometimes schools don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have funding for a post. Still, you’ll want to meet with them anyway. Other times, schools are quite certain they have two positions, but then later university politics shift and they turn out to have none.

After the AMA, you’ll hopefully get “fly-outs,” that is, offers to come and visit the campus and give a talk. This means you’ve made the top five or so. Most offers go down in December. There’s a second market that happens after all the schools realize they’ve made offers to the same person. Of course, some schools get wise to this and don’t make offers to amazing people who would have come. We need some kind of market mechanism to work out this part of the system.

THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP” RULE
Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that he or she will not be your colleague in the future. You should then think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend. You’ll need friends to collaborate, to get tenure, get grants, and to go on the market again if you’re not happy with what you get.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IN WHICH ROOM TO INTERVIEW?
The schools will leave messages for you telling you in which rooms your interviews will be. You’ll get calls, emails, and notes held for you at the hotel reception. Some schools will fail to get in touch with you so you have to try to find them. Many profs ask the hotel to make their room number public, but for some reason many hotel operators will still not give you the room number. Naturally having a laptop and internet connection allows for emailing of room numbers. Try to take care of this early on the first day.

HOW TO TREAT YOURSELF WHILE THERE
My sponsor gave me the advice of not going out at night and getting room service for breakfast and dinner. This worked for me. Also, the ridiculously high price of a room-service breakfast made me feel like I was sparing no expense, which I found strangely motivating.

HOW DO THE ACTUAL AMA INTERVIEWS GO?
At the pre-arranged time you will knock on their hotel room door. You will be let into a suite (p=.4) or a normal hotel room (p=.5, but see below). In the latter case, there will be professors with long and illustrious titles—people you once imagined as dignified—sitting on beds in their socks. The other people in the room may not look at you when you walk in because they will be looking for a precious few seconds at your CV. For at least some people in the room, this may be the first time they have concentrated on your CV. Yikes is right. Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.

THE SEAT OF HONOR
There will be one armchair in the room. Someone will motion towards the armchair, smile, and say, “You get the seat of honor!” This will happen at every school, at every interview, for three days. I promise.

THE TIME COURSE
There will be two minutes of pleasant chit-chat. They will propose that you talk first and they talk next. There will be a little table next to the chair on which you will put your flip book of slides. You will present for 30 minutes, taking their questions as they come. They will be very nice. When done, they will ask you if you have anything to ask them. You of course do not. You hate this question. You make something up. Don’t worry, they too have a spiel, and all you need to do is find a way to get them started on it. By the time they are done, it’s time for you to leave. The whole experience will feel like it went rather well.

PREDICTING IF YOU WILL GET A FLY-OUT
It’s impossible to tell from how it seems to have gone whether they will give you a fly-out or not. Again, this is the land of staggering and high-impact uncertainty. They might not invite you because you were too bad (and they don’t want you), or because you were too good (and they think they don’t stand a chance of getting you).

DO INTERVIEWS DEVIATE FROM THAT MODEL?
Yes.

Sometimes instead of a hotel room, they will have a private meeting room (p=.075). Sometimes they will have a private meeting room with fruit, coffee, and bottled water (p=.025). Sometimes, they will fall asleep while you are speaking (p=.05). Sometimes they will be rude to you (p=.025). Sometimes a key person will miss an early interview due to a hangover (p=.025). Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day, they will offer you alcohol (p=.18, conditional on it being the end of the day).

HOW YOU THINK THE PROCESS WORKS
The committee has read your CV and cover letter and looked at your pubs. They know your topic and can instantly appreciate that what you are doing is important. They know the value of each journal you have published in and each prize you’ve won. They know your advisor and the strengths she or he instills into each student. They ignore what they’re supposed to ignore and assume everything they’re supposed to assume. They’ll attach a very small weight to the interview and fly you out based on your record, which is the right thing to do according to a mountain of research on interviews.

HOW THE PROCESS REALLY WORKS
The interviewers will have looked at your CV for about one minute a couple months ago, and for a few seconds as you walked in the room. They will never have read your entire cover letter, and they will have forgotten most of what they did read. They could care less about your advisor and will get offended that you didn’t cite their advisor. They’ll pay attention to everything they’re supposed to ignore and assume nothing except what you repeat five times. Flouting 50 years of research in judgment and decision-making, they’ll attach a small weight to your CV and fly you out based on your interview.

IF ENGLISH IS NOT YOUR MOTHER TONGUE
Your ability to speak English well won’t get you a good job, but your inability to do so will eliminate you from consideration at every top school. Understand that business schools put a premium on teaching. If the interviewers don’t think you can communicate in the classroom, they’re probably not going to take a chance on you. If you are just starting out and your spoken English is shaky, my advice is to work on it as hard as you are working on anything else. Hire a dialect coach (expensive) or an english-speaking actor or improviser (cheaper) to work with you on your English pronunciation. In the Internet age, it’s quite easy to download samples of English conversational speech, for instance from podcasts, for free. It’s also very easy to get a cheap headset and a free audio recorder (like Audacity) with which to practice.

TWO WAYS TO GIVE YOUR SPIEL
1) The plow. You start and the first slide and go through them until the last slide. Stop when interrupted and get back on track.

2) The volley. Keep the slides closed and just talk with the people about your topic. Get them to converse with you, to ask you questions, to ask for clarifications. When you need to show them something, open up the presentation and show them just that slide.

I did the plow the first year and the volley the second year. I got four times more fly-outs the second year. Econometricians are working hard to determine if there was causality.

HOW TO ACT
Make no mistake, you are an actor auditioning for a part. There will be no energy in the room when you arrive. You have to be like Santa Claus bringing in a large sack of energy. The interviewers will be tired. They’ve been listening to people in a stuffy hotel room from dawn till dusk for days. If you do an average job, you lose: You have to be two standard deviations above the mean to get a fly-out. So audition for the part, and make yourself stand out. If you want to learn how actors audition, read Audition by Michael Shurtleff.

SOCIAL SKILLS MATTER
From the candidate’s point of view, everything is about the CV and the correctness of the mathematical proofs in the job market paper. However, for better or for worse, extra-academic qualities matter. Here are two examples. 1) The Social Lubricant factor. Departments get visitors all the time: guest speakers, visiting professors, job candidates, etc. Some departments are a bunch of folks who stare at their shoes when introduced to a new person. These departments have a real problem: they have nobody on board who can make visitors feel at ease, and sooner or later word starts to spread about how socially awkward the people at University X are. To fix such problems, departments sometimes hire socially-skilled types who know how to make people comfortable in conversation, and who know how to ask good questions during talks. Also, interviewers assume that people who can talk a good game will be star teachers. 2) The Soft Sell factor. Many people succeed in academia not because they are often right, but also because they are masters of making other people feel like they aren’t wrong. Defensiveness or determination to embarrass when responding to critique is a sure way to blow an interview.

HAVE A QUIRK
One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you. My quirk is that I worked internationally as an actor and theater director for over 10 years; I even had a bit part in a Conan O’Brien sketch on TV. It has nothing to do my research, but people always bring up this odd little fact when I do campus visits. Some bits of trivia are just more memorable than others.

DON’T GIVE UP
Never think it’s hopeless. Just because you’re not two SDs above the mean at the school of your dreams, it does not mean you’re not the dream candidate of another perfectly good school.

Many candidates don’t realize the following: The students are competing for schools but the schools are also competing for students. If you strike out, you can just try again next year. I know a person in Psychology who got 70 rejections in one year. I know a person in Marketing who was told he didn’t place in the top 60 candidates at the 20th ranked school. The subsequent year, both people got hired by top 5 departments. One of them is ridiculously famous!

RUMORS
Gossip can mess with your chances. Gossip that you are doing well can hurt you because schools will be afraid to invite you if they think you won’t come. Gossip that you are doing poorly can hurt you because schools that like you will be afraid to invite you if they think no one else does. Sometimes people will ask a prof at your school if you would come to their school, and the prof will then ask you. To heck with that. Just say that if they want to talk to you, they should talk with you directly.

The danger of rumors can be summed up by the following story. At ACR in 2003, I was having a beer with someone who confessed, “you know, my friend X at school Y told me that they want to hire you, but they’re afraid your wife won’t move to Z”. I was single.

SHARE YOUR OWN AMA HORROR STORIES
I am more than happy to publish anonymous AMA horror stories as part of this post. You can reach me at dan at dangoldstein dot com.

GET CONFIDENT ABOUT YOUR INTERVALS

Decision Science News is happy with its purchase of Statistical Rules of Thumb by Gerald van Belle many years ago. It’s full of examples in which math can surprise.

The first example in the book is titled “use at least 12 observations in constructing a confidence interval”. When people first hear this they think, nonsense, there’s nothing magic about the number twelve.  And then they think that confidence interval sizes have to do with the square root of the sample size, but that still doesn’t do it. Thinking harder, one realizes that the half-width confidence interval for a sample of size n is t(n-1,1-alpha)/sqrt(n). One plots this out for 90% and 95% CIs and one sees that the first intuition was right, there is nothing magic about 12, but the plot above sure does seem to stop dropping in width somewhere around there. Maybe 15 is a safer number. To make it easier to see, here are the points on the above graph from the value 15 and greater.

We love heuristics for statistics, but do not promote following rules of thumb without reflection. We do promote playing with such rules of thumb as a way to become aware of the tradeoffs one makes in designing experiments. To encourage such play, we post the R code behind the above graphs here.

R CODE
(Don’t know R yet? Learn by watching: R Video Tutorial 1, R Video Tutorial 2)

n=seq(3,30,.1)
alpha=.1
y90=qt(1-alpha/2,n-1)/sqrt(n)
alpha=.05
y95=qt(1-alpha/2,n-1)/sqrt(n)

plot.new()
plot(n,y90,type=”l”,xlim=c(0,30),ylim=c(0,3),ylab=”Half-Width Confidence Interval Size”, xlab=”Sample Size”)
lines(n,y95,type=”l”)
text(15,y95[which(n==15)]+.15,labels=”95%”)
text(15,y90[which(n==15)]-.15,labels=”90%”)

#second plot
plot.new()
a=min(which(n>=15))
b=max(which(n>=15))
plot(n[a:b],y90[a:b],type=”l”,xlim=c(0,30),ylim=c(0,3),ylab=”Half-Width Confidence Interval Size”, xlab=”Sample Size”)
lines(n[a:b],y95[a:b],type=”l”)
text(15,y95[which(n==15)]+.15,labels=”95%”)
text(15,y90[which(n==15)]-.15,labels=”90%”)

Update: After Arjan’s comment, I tried to figure out if Van Belle is Dutch. I didn’t figure that out, but I did learn that he keeps a lot of these tips on his site. There’s even one on the 12 observation rule and some information added by others, including this figure:

JOBS FOR THE PRE- AND POST-DOCTORAL OF THE WORLD

Those job-seeking, PhD-wielding, DSN-reading, decision-making researchers will be happy to know that we’ve got four post-doctoral positions, hot off the griddle. Have everything but the PhD? We have two pre-doctoral opportunities for you this week as well.

– – –

University of Colorado-Boulder

The University of Colorado-Boulder anticipates hiring a post-doctoral research associate in the interdisciplinary Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. Basic research in judgment and decision making, psychology, consumer research, and behavioral economics can inform our understanding of financial decisions such as choosing a mortgage, saving for retirement, decumulating savings, using credit cards, and paying for health care. The Center will conduct basic research and more applied work to inform public policy.

This would be two-year position, with a start date of August 1, 2010. The associate will conduct research with Professor John Lynch in the Leeds School of Business and with other colleagues in business and psychology.

http://leeds.colorado.edu/Directory/interior.aspx?id=8054

The associate will collaborate on projects relating to the roles of comprehension, attention, affect, and intertemporal planning on financial decision making. One area of focus will be how soon-to-be retirees make decisions about annuitization of savings. Another focus is decision aids for complex financial decisions such as choosing a mortgage, taking into account theories of the psychology of decision-making.

The ideal candidate would be an accomplished psychology PhD interested in seeking a faculty position in consumer research and marketing. Marketing departments at most leading business schools have a history hiring psychology PhDs whose work has implications for consumer behavior. They seek scholars who can publish in the top journals both in marketing / consumer research and allied basic disciplines. They also require that these scholars demonstrate that they can teach effectively in a business school setting.

This associateship is designed to help the scholar achieve these goals. The Associate will work in the lab at the Center for Research on Consumers’ Financial Decision Making and in the psychology department and collaborate on research aimed at journals in both psychology and consumer research. If so desired, the associate can teach one undergraduate section of marketing research per year in the Leeds School of Business under Lynch’s supervision for additional salary.

This position is open to candidates with behavioral research experience, data analysis and modeling skills, and training in judgment and decision-making, social psychology, cognitive psychology, or a related

Discipline. Candidate should have recently earned PhD or who are expecting their doctorate in 2010, on a topic relevant to issues in financial decision-making, broadly defined. To get a sense of the scope of such topics, please see the website for the First Annual Boulder Summer Conference on Consumers’ Financial Decision Making, http://cfdmc.colorado.edu/ including the conference program.

Application materials should be should be submitted online to http://www.jobsatcu.com/. Click on Search Postings and enter the job posting number 809691. Applications should include a CV, two letters of recommendation, reprints of published papers, and a cover letter. The cover letter should describe your research interests and expertise, your computer and data analysis skills, and should point out any connections to the research programs of Lynch. The Recruiting Committee Chair is John Lynch (john.g.lynch at colorado.edu), the Ted G. Anderson Professor at CU.

Review of applications will start April 1st and continue until April 30th.

The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

– – –

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is seeking candidates for a Post-doctoral Research Associate for a large-scale field study examining consumer response to enhanced methods for controlling electricity use at home. The research team includes psychology, economics, and engineering. Duties will include participation in research design and execution, supervision of data files and analyses, report writing, and coordination with electric utility partners.

Requirements: PhD in psychology or related behavioral science; relevant research experience. Project begins March 2010. Supported by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Carnegie Mellon University.

Applications must include a CV, an example of written work, and a cover letter indicating your related experiences and interest in the position. Applications should be sent by email to: lave at cmu.edu

– – –

Michigan State University

We are looking for a postdoc researcher to work on a project on the neural mechanisms of decision making. This is a joint position between the Neuroimaging of Perception and Attention Laboratory (PI: Taosheng Liu) and the Laboratory of Cognitive and Decision Sciences (PI: Timothy Pleskac). The research project will use mathematical models to fit choice behavioral data and fMRI to measure brain activity in decision tasks. We aim to combine these approaches to probe the fundamental mechanisms of decision making.

The ideal candidate should have a strong background in mathematical models of decision making and/or a strong background in system/ cognitive neuroscience. Prior experience with mathematical modeling, fMRI, and strong programming skills (e.g., C/C++, Matlab) are highly preferred. Duties include designing and implementing experiments, data collection and analysis, and writing and presenting results. Our labs are affiliated with the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program in the Department of Psychology, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Neuroscience Program at Michigan State University. The candidate will receive further training in modeling and fMRI methodologies, as well as have opportunities to interact with a diverse body of scientists in cognitive and neural science. A recent PhD in a relevant discipline (e.g., psychology, neuroscience, computer science) is required and salary will commensurate with experience. The appointment is for one year with the possibility for renewal for two years pending availability of funds. The targeted starting date is summer/early fall of 2010.

Interested candidate should send a C.V., pdfs of representative publications, a brief statement of research, and names and addresses of at least two referees to either Tim Pleskac (pleskact at msu.edu) or Taosheng Liu (tsliu at msu.edu). Informal inquiries are also welcome. Review of candidates will begin May 1 and will continue until the position is filled.

For more information see the following websites:
Tim Pleskac’s lab page: http://www.msu.edu/~pleskact
Taosheng Liu’s lab page: http://psychology.msu.edu/liulab

– – –

Applied Biomathematics

Applied Biomathematics (www.ramas.com/research.htm) anticipates an opening for a one- or two-year post doctoral position for a mathematical psychologist working in the area of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty in decision making. The project addresses risk communication from a biological perspective (see Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence, Experience, 2008, edited by Tucker et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 1128). Post docs at Applied Biomathematics commonly go on to academic appointments. The project will be directed by Scott Ferson (www.ramas.com/sferson.htm) and Christian Luhmann of Stony Brook University (www.psychology.sunysb.edu/cluhmann-/luhmann). Please send curriculum vitae and a writing sample to admin at ramas.com.

– – –

Pre-doc specials: University of Basel

2 Doctoral Positions in Psychology at the University of Basel, Switzerland

The Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences (www.cds.unibas.ch – headed by Ralph Hertwig) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Basel is seeking two new Ph.D. students for the following projects:

A) Executive Search Processes and Decision Making in Long-Term Memory

This research will focus on the processes of encoding and retrieval in long-term memory, and how executive processes dynamically guide search in memory representations similar to the way animals search for food in space. Interested applicants should have a Master’s degree in Psychology and an interest in cognitive modeling and experimental approaches to memory.

B) Dialectical Bootstrapping: A New Paradigm to Improve Individual Judgment

This research focuses on the process of creating “the wisdom of crowds” within the mind of a single person by using “dialectical bootstrapping”—averaging a person’s two estimates so that errors are likely to cancel each other out. Interested applicants should have a Master’s degree in Psychology and an interest in cognitive modeling and judgment and decision making.

Applicants should send a CV, a letter of interest and two letters of recommendation to Dr. Thomas Hills at thomas.hills at unibas.ch (for project A) or Dr. Stefan Herzog at stefan.herzog at unibas.ch (for project B). Deadline for applications is April 30, 2010. The position is available immediately.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/143186839/

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 Science News editor, and other Marketing academics such as friend of the site Andrew Stephen, were discussed. What to do when such a story hits the media other than to put it back into social media? Hence this post.

Excerpt:

To meet this demand for education in social media strategy, several top business schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their M.B.A. curriculums. These include Harvard Business School; London Business School; Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France; and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as H.E.C., in Paris.

M.B.A. curriculums are geared toward students with business intelligence, knowledge of communication trends and a flair for innovation. Social network courses aim to build on their existing skills to teach an understanding of social media, of how to build marketing strategies within social networks and of how to track their effectiveness.

Why the picture of TV’s Mad Men?

“It’s about testing things, and not about ‘Mad Men’-style intuition,” Professor Goldstein said, referring to the popular U.S. television series about whiskey-soaked advertising executives in 1960s New York.

Those who want to teach themselves Internet Marketing at home may find the syllabus useful.

PICK NCAA WINNERS WITH THE LARGEST COMBINATORIAL PREDICTION MARKET EVER

Tracking 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot offers something for everyone.

Dave Pennock sits behind the Decision Science News editor at Yahoo! Research (a kind of academic department sitting inside a company). Much more importantly, he has lead a team that has built what is probably the largest prediction market in history. The market is called Predictalot and its first mission is a fun one: the predict NCAA basketball winners.

The team is: Mani Abrol, Janet George, Tom Gulik, Mridul Muralidharan, Sudar Muthu, Navneet Nair, Abe Othman, Daniel Reeves, Pras Sarkar.

What’s special about Predictalot is that it lets you bet on just about anything that you like, and all the bets are interconnected (which helps it make better predictions of what will happen). Says Dave

Because we track all possible outcomes, the predictions are automatically interconnected in ways you would expect. A large play on Duke to win the tournament instantly and automatically increases the odds of Duke winning in the first round; after all, Duke can’t win the whole thing without getting past the first round.

And

A combinatorial market maker fulfills an almost magical promise: propose any obscure proposition, click ‘accept’, and your bet is placed: no doubt and no waiting.

You can play Predictalot by clicking to play directly, or by adding it to your Yahoo home page.

Predictalot is a combinatorial prediction market and it’s been generating a lot of media interest, for example:

• Crowdsourcing the NCAA tournament (NY Times Bits)
• Yahoo’s New Crowdsourcing Predictalot App Picks NCAA Winners (NY Times VentureBeat)

FINDINGS PAPERS AND CONCEPTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOMED

This week, we post an editorial from the Journal of Consumer Research, an “A” Marketing journal that publishes quite a bit of quality judgment and decision-making research. JCR is now welcoming shorter findings papers and longer conceptual papers. In the past, some folks felt that JCR was leaning too heavily towards multi-experiment empirical papers. And if you’re a psychologist thinking that “multi-experiment” means 3 studies of 26 participants each, hold onto your hat because it wasn’t unusual to see JCR papers with 5 studies of 100 participants each.  (DSN hasn’t fact checked this, but it does vaguely remember an ACR Conference luncheon address in which the speaker had calculated one need to run something like 800 participants (including pilot studies and studies eventually dropped for length concerns) to get a paper in ACR). The distribution of article types should be changing now, for the better.

Does anyone remember what that number was? We think is was 800 or 900. Also, does anyone have an idea why psychology done in a marketing journal involves so many more participants per condition than psychology done in a psychology journal?

Journal of Consumer Research
Editorial

Broadening the Scope of Consumer Research

In analyzing the types of submissions we receive, it is clear that the majority fall into one of two bins. The first category of papers consists of psychological pieces that offer theoretical advances with empirical support. These papers sometimes propose a new phenomenon and the process by which it occurs or they dig deeper into the process underlying an established phenomenon. They provide evidence for the relation between putative causes and observed effects (the theorized process) by testing for mediation, moderation, and boundary conditions. Such papers commonly present several experiments to provide evidence for the underlying process and to rule out alternative process accounts. For example, as a consequence of this detail, the average number of studies reported in JCR papers in the last year is 3.5. The second category of papers consists of qualitative research, much of it conducted within the consumer culture theory paradigm. These papers put the disembodied heads of consumers, which is the focus of the psychological studies, back on their bodies, situate them in a culture and moment and so provide a rich contextual understanding of consumer behavior. Despite some chafing, these fields work as a team to advance the study of consumer behavior, coming at our understanding from high to low, from big picture to thin slices. Missing from these sets are at least two types of papers that we would be pleased to receive, and that we highlight in this essay. The first set is findings papers (heavy on effects, light on theory). The second is conceptual contributions (heavy on idea, light on data). Both types of papers are important means by which a field moves forward and are highly appropriate for JCR. Each has distinctive criteria by which their contribution is evaluated. We briefly discuss these criteria below.

Findings papers are distinct from the more common articles because their contribution would be judged on the nature of the effect, not the establishment of the underlying process. Only a small number of papers would make the grade in this category as the effect would have to be new, important, and provocative. Such novel effects would not be common but when they are found, we want to know about them right away. The findings would be interesting because they run counter to established theory, conventional wisdom, or lay beliefs (Van Den Bergh, Dewitte, and Warlop 2008; Brendl, Markman, and Messner 2003), open new avenues of study about important areas of consumer research that the field has not yet pioneered (Peck and Childers 2003), or suggest ways in which consumers are made better or worse off because of surprising ways in which they think or behave (Hsee, Yu, Zhang, and Zhang 2003). The goal in these papers is to establish the effect credibly, to ensure it is not some better known effect in superficially unfamiliar guise, and, if possible to point the field in direction for future study by highlighting moderators or boundary conditions or by suggesting the general direction of underlying process. However, these papers would not be required to nail down the underlying process, although some of the papers cited as examples above do go a long way in this regard. Authors might not yet know what is producing a new effect. Holding up publication of the phenomenon while the authors try to figure it out fails to utilize the talents of the field. By publishing the effect, the authors turn it over to the community with its portfolio of skills for further exploration. In other words, send us your “cool ideas,” in appropriately short, to-the-point papers, quite possibly with a single study. Our reviewers are skilled in judging both quality of the effect and the establishment of process and they can advise the editors of the contribution on each path. While our reviewers might commonly emphasize process evidence, particularly for longer papers that are intended to explore underlying mechanisms, these reviewers have the ability and our editorial encouragement to judge contribution considering effects alone. Our turnaround time is fast and the editors are supportive. We want to see this work.

Conceptual contributions are also distinct from the more common articles because their contribution would be judged on making breakthrough ideas or providing new ways of thinking about an important aspect of consumer behavior. Only a small number of these papers would make the grade here as well because the idea would need to be breakthrough, interesting, theoretically grounded, clarifying, and generative (capable of stimulating research). Whereas we anticipate that “effect” type papers might be shorter than the typical JCR paper, conceptual contributions may be longer than the traditional paper since they reflect “big” ideas that may take considerable space to articulate. Two categories of these articles are called “new perspectives” and “integrative frameworks.”

New perspectives introduce a new construct, theory, or domain that is important but has not been considered in our field despite its clear potential for generating new insights. In some cases these articles are particularly important because they illuminate an idea that rings true even though it may run counter to a prevailing paradigm, world view, or metaphorical lens for viewing consumer behavior. Such is true with Holbrook and Hirschman’s (1982) paper on experiential consumption. In other cases, they make us consider ideas that have been considered elsewhere (gift-giving, Sherry 1983; family identity, Epp and Price 2008; sharing, Belk 2010) but which have not been considered in our field, despite their clear potential for adding insight. These papers would not merely introduce an idea that has been studied elsewhere. Instead, they would show how our understanding of consumers and consumer behavior may be enhanced or changed by its study. The goal of both sets of papers is to introduce the new idea, show why it is important, articulate how it differs from the prevailing idea or what gaps it fills, and show what new ideas its study can bring about. Often, these papers provide organizing frameworks, visual devices or comparative charts that visually depict the idea and what new things it might explain. They may offer suggestions on how to study this construct, theory or domain, and/or develop explicit hypotheses which can be tested in future research (Alba and Hutchinson 1987).

A second category of conceptual contribution is the integrative framework. These articles organize a large body of consumer research studies (and perhaps studies from adjacent fields as well) into a new perspective. Papers that make the grade here do not merely review or summarize what is known about a construct, theory, or domain. They develop an elegant higher order parsimonious perspective that both accommodates past findings and accounts for anomalous ones. Such is true with Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, Cohen and Reed’s (2006) Multiple Pathway Anchoring and Adjustment model of attitude generation and recruitment, or Bettman, Luce, and Payne’s (1998) model of constructive choice. Novelty here comes from organizing existing findings into a powerful yet simplified view that adds clarity and reduces complexity. Novelty also comes from articulating new ideas that derive from the framework that other researchers can test empirically. Here too, we would not hold authors responsible for testing new ideas from their integrative perspective. Instead, we would expect that these ideas would be followed up by other researchers.

In sum, we are delighted with the quality of submissions to the journal but we encourage authors presently working on or contemplating effects articles or conceptual pieces to consider the Journal of Consumer Research a welcoming outlet for their contributions.

John Deighton, Editor-in-Chief
Debbie MacInnis, Editor
Ann McGill, Editor
Baba Shiv, Editor

CHOICE ARCHITECTURE ON WHEELS

Decision Science News was in a cab in Houston some years ago. The driver said that he did not like it when people paid by credit card, claiming that if the card turned out not to be good, it was his loss. DSN never really understood this. Perhaps in Houston they used the old-fashioned schoonk-schoonk credit card readers that don’t approve the card first? One would have thought the drivers would appreciate having less cash on hand, giving people less reason to rob them.

New York City cabs now have credit card readers and touch-screen computers in the back. They present the passenger with preconfigured tip options, which start at 15%. The passenger can enter his or her own tip, but this requires more typing. What does this do to the amount people tip? The data are in. It turns out that the cabbies get bigger tips when cards are used.

Why? Good question. Perhaps when people tip by cash they tend to round against the driver’s favor. Or perhaps the menu of choice options causes people to see the merits of tipping at least 15%. Or perhaps when the least-effort option is to tip 15% or more, people will go down the path of least resistance. Similar, but not totally similar to default effects, a specialty of the house here at Decision Science News.

P.S. DSN likes to use its PayPass. One simply holds his or her keychain (or special credit card) up to a PayPass reader in the back of the cab et voila, payment magically occurs. It is the ultimate in payment decoupling, you literally do not have to touch anything in order to pay. We see a future PhD thesis topic in this somewhere. Would not having to touch anything make you more likely to pay? Would you pay more?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/69593289/sizes/m/

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 are three people who know a thing or two about bounded rationality!

Foundations for an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory
05 – 12 July, 2010
Berlin, Germany

Directed by: Gerd Gigerenzer & Vernon Smith
Evening Lecture: Ariel Rubinstein
Location: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Deadline to apply: March 20th, 2010

It is our pleasure to announce the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2010 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory, which will take place from July 5th to 12th, 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The objective of the Summer Institute is to provide a platform for interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, economics, biology, philosophy, and neuroscience. It wants to push for a common understanding of the way Homo Sapiens forms decisions, challenging the reigning assumptions in the individual disciplines. This year, the evening lecture will be given by Ariel Rubinstein.

Talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 20th, 2010. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available at http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/SummerInstitute .

Please pass on this information to potential candidates from your own department or institute.

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INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CLINICAL REASONING

When: Saturday 17 April to Sunday 18 April 2010
Where: London, UK
Keynote speakers: Professor Valerie Reyna (Cornell University) and Professor Willem Kuyken (University of Exeter)
Sponsor: European Association for Decision Making (EADM)
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/medicine/research/hscr/seminars/iwcr/

The 5th International Workshop on Clinical Reasoning provides a forum for researchers who investigate the mental processes of clinicians making diagnostic and treatment decisions.

We welcome contributions that present empirical evidence, theoretical accounts as well as planned research. These are examples of topics that would be of interest: research into various modes of clinical reasoning (e.g. intuitive, analytical, heuristic, causal), the circumstances when the different modes may not be appropriate and lead to error, the types of knowledge involved, how the features of the task may influence reasoning, individual differences in reasoning, strategies for improving reasoning, methodologies for the study of clinical reasoning.

For the first time, the workshop will aim to bring together researchers of medical diagnostic reasoning and of psychodiagnostic reasoning (‘case formulation’), and thus provide the opportunity for cross-fertilisation between two domains that do not often interact.

Scientific Committee
York Hagmayer, University of Göttingen
Olga Kostopoulou, King’s College London
Cilia Witteman, Radboud University Nijmegen

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ASSISTING DECISION MAKERS: A WORKSHOP MEETING

When people find it difficult to make decisions, they may benefit from assistance given to them by other people. Those providing assistance may be experts in a particular domain (e.g., medicine, law, finance) or in the way that decisions should be made (decision support). There are four types of help that people may receive. First, they may be given information in some form that makes it easy for them to use. For example, this information may relate to risks associated with different choices. Second, they may receive advice from other people about an appropriate course of action or about some uncertain quantity, such as the risks or expected returns associated with different courses of action. Third, they may share their decision making process with the person assisting them. Fourth, they may have their decision made for them.

This workshop will focus on these approaches to assisting decision makers and on factors relevant to choosing which should be used in different situations. It is supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and it will be held at University College London on 15 and 16 April. Invited speakers include J Frank Yates (Michigan), Ilan Yaniv (Jerusalem), and Eric Stone (Wake Forest).

If you wish to present a poster of relevant work at the meeting, please send its title and a 150-word abstract to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) before 5pm on March 12th 2010. There may also be a few slots available for spoken presentations. Please let Matt know if you would be interested in filling one.

Attendance at the meeting incurs no cost but you need to register by sending an email to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) by 12 March 2010. He will confirm your registration and provide you with further details.

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We invite submissions to the following forthcoming conference:

Behavioural Finance Working Group Conference:

Topic: Fairness, Trust and Emotions in Finance.
Date: 1-2 July 2010
Venue: Behavioural Finance Working Group, Cass Business School, London, UK
Keynote Speaker: Robert Olsen, Institute of Behavioral Finance

Organisers: Richard Fairchild (School of Management, University of
Bath), Gulnur Muradoglu (Cass Business School) and Daniel Zizzo
(University of East Anglia).

Special Issue: Presenters have the option to have their papers
considered for a special issue of the International Journal of
Behavioural Accounting and Finance.

The deadline for submissions is May 21st 2010

The detailed Call for Papers is as follows:

Overview: Traditionally, financial economists have based their analysis
of financial contracting on the assumption that agents are fully
rational, emotionless, self-interested maximizers of expected utility
(the homo economicus assumption). Behavioural economists are
increasingly recognizing that financial decision makers may be subject
to psychological biases, and the effects of emotions (the homo sapiens
view). An interesting area of research examines the implications of
assuming that agents are not completely self-interested, but that they
also consider the impact of their actions on the payoffs of others. In
this meeting, we will consider the effects of fairness, trust, empathy,
fellow-feeling, and emotional reactions on financial contracting,
incentives and performance.

We seek contributions from areas which include while not being limited
to the following issues:

-decision-making at the corporate level (for example, the effect of
emotions, trust, and empathy on the FDI decision and on capital
budgeting),

-decision making at the start-up level (the effect of fairness, trust
and empathy on venture capitalist/entrepreneurial financial
contracting, incentives and performance),

-decision making at the investor level (investors’ trust in corporate
managers).

We invite you to submit extended abstracts, papers-in-progress or full
papers by the deadline of May 21st 2010.

The organisers will come back with a decision within three weeks after
this deadline.To submit a paper for consideration please email a PDF
version of the paper to [1]Behavioural-Finance@city.ac.uk

Papers chosen for submission will, at the author’s request, be
considered for publication for a Special Issue of the International
Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance

Kind regards,
Gulnur Muradoglu
Cass Business School

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH 2010 CONFERENCE

Conference Announcement and Call for Submissions
Conference website: http://www.acrweb.org/acr/

The 2010 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research will be held at the Hyatt Regency Riverfront in Jacksonville, FLfrom Thursday, October 7 through Sunday, October 10, 2010.

The theme of ACR 2010 is: Think BIGBig Ideas. Big Findings. We would like to promote research that has a big picture focus. Big picture research either involves building theories that apply to a wide range of phenomena or discovering “big” phenomena that are of real importance to consumers’ lives. We also would like to promote a big picture way of communicating findings and theories at the conference. We would like talks to focus on the main ideas at the expense of detail. Several changes at this year’s conference reflect the Think Big theme. Every special session will have four, shorter talks. Session chairs are asked to kick-start discussion about big picture implications at the end of special and competitive paper sessions. Abstracts in the program will be shorter, encouraging authors to clearly communicate their big picture ideas. Finally, we will appeal to reviewers and Associate Editors to err on the side of big picture contributions instead of methodological perfection.

The conference format will follow that of past years. A pre-conference Doctoral Symposium will be held Thursday (co-chaired by Priya Raghubir and Patti Williams). Thursday evening will feature an opening reception for ACR 2010. The conference program on Friday and Saturday will include competitive paper sessions, special sessions, roundtable discussions, poster sessions, and the film festival. A gala reception will be held Saturday evening.

Format and Program Structure
There are five submission types for ACR 2010.

1. Competitive Papers represent the completed original work of their authors. The ACR conference associate editors and co-chairs assign papers to sessions that reflect similar scholarly interests.
2. Special Sessions provide opportunities for focused attention on significant areas of research. Successful sessions shed light on a specific research area. They raise questions about the state of the area and open avenues for future research.
3. Films at the film festival sessions provide video insight into consumer topics.
4. Roundtables encourage intensive participant discussion of discussion-worthy topics.
5. Poster Sessions present findings from a current working paper. Authors display posters of their research, distribute their papers, and are available to discuss and answer questions during the assigned poster session

A paper submitted in one track cannot be considered in any other track if it is rejected.

Submission and Decision Deadlines

All submissions (for competitive papers, special sessions, films, posters and roundtables) must be received by Monday, March 1, 2010 by 5:00 pm Jacksonville time (EST). Note that this is earlier than last year’s deadline. In order to maintain accessibility to a wide range of participants, each attendee may present only twice in special and/or competitive paper sessions during the conference. When uploading a submission, authors will need to specify the paper presenter.

Notification of acceptance will be made by Friday, July 2, 2010.

General Submission Requirements

1. Submissions should not already be published, or accepted for publication in any journal. Submissions should also not include content that has been presented at earlier North American ACR conferences.
2. It is mandatory that all accepted papers are presented at the conference by an author.

Submission Procedures
All submission activity (submissions, reviews and notifications) for ACR 2010 will be electronic, through the conference website (URL:http://www.acrweb.org/acr/).

In order to use the conference website (e.g., to submit a manuscript or provide a review), you will need to sign up at and create a user profile (follow the online instructions). If you are already signed up (i.e., if you have used this ACR conference management system in the past), please log in to the system and update your user profile (content and methods codes). To log in and update your profile, please click here .”

Any time you log on to the website, you will see the following message: “To submit a paper or a proposal, please click here. ” Please click on the link and follow the instructions.

All submissions to the 2010 ACR Conference website require the following information:

• Submission Type: Competitive Paper, Special Session, Film, Poster, Roundtable.
• Title of Submission
• Primary Contact Information: name, affiliation, mailing address, phone number and email address for the author who serves as the primary contact
• Names of Co-authors/Other Participants and their affiliations, and whether they are presenting author(s).
• Content Area Codes and Methodological Area Codes for your submission (These are critical for assigning reviewers – please pick codes that provide the best match to your work).
• Declaration that the submission has not been accepted for publication elsewhere.
• Signed copyright release form.
Use Word 2003 or Rich Text Format file format to upload.
Use consistent author name: All authors need to ensure that their names appear in the same way in all submissions. This is because the database will consider Gita Johar, Gita V. Johar, and Gita Venkataramani Johar as three different authors and may result in a program that has Gita presenting at the same time in three different rooms.
Time limit. Please note that the website will time you out after 60 minutes. Therefore, in order to avoid losing information, it is best to copy and paste your information into submission fields rather than composing it online.

Acknowledgement of receipt. The primary contact person will automatically receive an email acknowledgement of receipt of the submission. If you do not receive an acknowledgement, please check your spam folder. If you do not receive an acknowledgement within 48 hours after submission, please send an email inquiry about the status of your submission to: ACR2010@chilleesys.com.

Specific Information for each Type of Submission

Please see the conference website: http://www.acrweb.org/acr/

Contact info
All program-related queries:
Email: ACR2010@rsm.nl

All administrative questions, such as, hotel, payment, registration, dietary restrictions:
Email: acr@acrwebsite.org