 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
The
participants of the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2009 |
|
Jörn Basel European School of Management, Germany I am a first year student in the PhD programme in International Management at the ESCP-EAP Berlin. Before that I studied psychology with emphasis on communication and cognition in Konstanz, Toronto and Heidelberg. In my research I try to investigate how complexity in performance measurement tools like the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) can be reduced based on theoretical concepts of bounded rationality. Besides that I am also interested in the role of trust in company-consumer relations and in norms of reciprocity. Since I am an avid triathlete I enjoy my spare time swimming, running and cycling, thus discovering more of Berlin and Brandenburg. Nicole Beckage Indiana University, Bloomington, USA This fall, I will be beginning my final year at Indiana University majoring in Mathematics, Cognitive Science and German. I plan on attending graduate school focusing on search strategies or decision making. I currently work with Professor Peter Todd on testing sequential search patterns in human mate choice using speed-dating. We are trying to discover what strategies humans in particular might use and how we can find evidence for them. We use this data to test a variety of models of mutual sequential mate search. I am also spending the summer at the Universität Basel where I will be working with Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig on using network analysis to investigate semantic representations. I am hoping to study whether children who are slower to learn to speak have a different learning style than fast or average learners. I will be attending the Cognitive Science conference this summer where I will be presenting my speed-dating research. Sven Bertel University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Sven Bertel is as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he works at the Human Factors Division and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He holds a doctoral degree in informatics from the University of Bremen with a thesis in artificial intelligence and spatial cognition on 'Spatial structures and visual attention in diagrammatic reasoning'. While at Bremen, Sven worked within the Cognitive Systems Research Group and the Transregional Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition. Previous studies and research stints had brought him to the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Hamburg, and Indiana University Bloomington. Sven’s main current research focuses on human spatial reasoning, visual attention and eye movements, human problem solving strategies with visuo-spatial problems and architectural design, computational models of visuo-spatial mental knowledge processing, and the use of computational models of cognition to improve human-computer cooperation. Marco Bokulic University of Zagreb, Croatia I am a student of Psychology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. In a current research project we are trying to find processing correlates of self-report measures of personality via the affective priming paradigm. In short, the goal is to find out if the tendency to show greater priming on positive or negative stimuli can be conceptualised as an explanation for the personality traits on the process level. Besides this, I have been involved in the translation and validation of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory which is a scale that measures people’s orientation towards past, present or future. We have tried to find out how this construct relates to proactive career behaviour. In the preliminary phase is a project of my colleague from Zagreb and I that involves the usage of heuristics in style attributions in art history. We are currently reviewing some qualitative data that would suggest which cues are used when attributing style to unknown paintings. After the initial research, we would like to explore the problem with a different methodology. Sabrina Böwe Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany I studied business and economics at Humboldt University Berlin (Germany) and Tilburg University (Netherlands). I specialized in industrial organization, microeconomics and entrepreneurship. After receiving my degree in business and management in 2007, I continued my studies as a PhD candidate at Humboldt University at the institute for Entrepreneurial Studies and Innovation Management. I work as a research associate for the interdisciplinary project “Innovation and Coordination”. This project is jointly conducted by Humboldt University, Columbia University and the DIW Berlin (German Institute for Economic Research) and brings together management researchers, economists, psychologists, and statisticians who examine the different phases and actors of innovation genesis. My research interests are in the field of behavioral and experimental economics. In particular I am dealing with behavioral game theory and the use of heuristics in strategic interaction, applying these to the field of entrepreneurial cognition and managerial decision making. Astrid Buba Max Planck Institute of Economics, Germany I am a psychologist by training with focus on clinical intervention, industrial psychology and social psychology. My research interests include threat to social identity, especially the relation of threat to status variables and how the perception and reaction towards threat are dependent on status differences and social distance in intergroup and work behaviour. Further research interests lie in the field of mapping emotions onto cognitive dimensions (e.g. with metaphors), counterproductive work behaviour and personality and other regarding preferences under status considerations. I am working with implicit measurement methods like the IAT as well as with explicit ones, aiming for inferences about the amount of interdependence between and interaction of implicit and explicit processes in a given context. At the moment I am gaining further insight into recently developed measures of implicit affect like the IPANAT. I am also interested in classifications for uncertainty in a psychological and economic sense and their similarities and differences. Daryl Cameron University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Daryl Cameron received his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary in 2006. He is currently a graduate student in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with sub-concentrations in philosophy and quantitative psychology. His main area of focus is implicit social cognition – or cognitive processes that run counter to people’s intentions – with a more specific interest in how these processes intersect with moral judgment. One line of research is looking at how people make moral judgments about implicit processes—in particular, how people react to racial discrimination resulting from unconscious and automatic biases. Another line of research is looking at how implicit processes are involved in moral judgment—how much control do people have over their own moral judgments? Finally, a separate line of research is investigating the role of motivated emotion regulation in the reduction of compassion toward others. Sean Carr University of Virginia, USA Sean Carr is a third-year doctoral candidate in Management at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He is exploring the broader implications of effectual versus causal decision processes, and his research aims to test its propositions through experiments and computational models. Effectuation is a framework for understanding entrepreneurial cognition and behavior. Derived from empirical studies conducted with Herb Simon, this approach formalizes the heuristics that expert entrepreneurs commonly employ to overcome resource constraints and mitigate the risks inherent in new-venture creation. At a time of global economic distress, Sean is motivated to develop a deeper understanding of how such fast-and-frugal heuristics simultaneously create value and manage risk. Sean is also a director of the Batten Institute, a research center for entrepreneurship and innovation at Darden, and he holds degrees from Northwestern, Columbia, and the University of Virginia. Previously, Sean was a journalist for CNN and ABC News. Kyle Chan University of Chicago, USA Kyle Chan is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago undergraduate program in economics with a particular focus on game theory, econometric analysis, and experimental economics. Outside of his concentration, Kyle has taken a range of courses on related topics such as cognitive psychology, organization theory, and artificial intelligence under the overarching question: How do micro models of individual decision-making translate into behavioral phenomena at the aggregate level, and vice versa? Kyle hopes to apply what he learns in this endeavor to his daily life, his work in management consulting, and possible future research in graduate school. Jesse Chin University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA During the program at UIUC, I have been involved with projects that investigate adaptive information foraging behavior in various task environments. In particular, I have been in charge of the project “Health 2.0”, which aims at studying how people search and utilize health information on the Internet. The project focuses on how people across lifespan adopt different search strategies according to their cognitive abilities and structural knowledge, which lead to different advantages on search performance in ill-defined and well-defined task environments. In addition, a new study to understand how people make likelihood judgment based on information they acquire online is in progress, we assume different environment structures and task types should have varying degrees of impact on the judgment and search process of people across lifespan. The series of studies, together with a computational cognitive model we are currently developing, will lead to novel insights into the future of e-Health. Rene Cyranek University of Munich, Germany As a graduate in business administration, I am interested in both behavioral finance and behavioral economics. In these fields, joint work of economists and psychologists often is very promising. One of my projects covers prediction markets. Within this topic I am mainly interested in market microstructure. Up to now, there is no established model for the formation of final prices. Though recently, several attempts have been made to put forward such a theoretical model. We conducted a large-scale field experiment. We elicited certain traders’ characteristics that commonly are named the most important ones. Currently we are analyzing this dataset. Another research field of my interest is punishment. Particularly the timing of punishment is an aspect which raises my attention. This aspect has not been as thoroughly analyzed as the kind of employed punishment and its severity. We use field data to take a closer look at timing and its consequences. Mareile Drechsler London School of Economics, UK Mareile Drechsler has studied economics at Cambridge University, and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. She is currently a PhD student at the LSE. Her main research interests are bounded rationality, choice theory and epistemic logic. Varun Dutt Carnegie Mellon University, USA Varun Dutt is currently a Ph.D. student in the department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. He holds triple Master’s degrees in areas of Software Engineering, Rational Simulation, and Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon in 2006, 2007 and 2009. The current focus of Varun's interests and research has been in the fields of dynamic decision-making, system’s thinking and modeling human behavior using Instance-Based approach implemented in ACT-R. Varun has applied himself to investigating problems concerning accumulations and flows in the domain of climate change. Most importantly, he is interested in answering the question of how people make repeated decisions and why people face so much difficulty in understanding feedback from decisions in simple problems concerning their day to day lives. Varun is also a freelance journalist and Knowledge Editor of a popular newspaper, FC and has authored more than 60 articles in different newspapers published in India. Renato Frey University of Basel, Switzerland The role of foregone payoffs in decisions from
experience Tobias Gerstenberg Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany I am interested in how people learn about the causal structure of their environment as well as how they exploit this knowledge to guide their decisions. Currently, I am testing a causal heuristic for interventions based on merely observational data generated from different artificial environments. In line with the idea of bounded rationality, the heuristic operates by only using a limited amount of information. However, despite its simplicity it can be shown to outperform a fully fledged Bayesian approach in environments that involve many potential causes and small numbers of observations – situations that are prototypical of the decision maker's ecology. Furthermore, I am exploring the relationship between causality and responsibility attributions. In my master's thesis, I addressed the question of how responsibility is allocated amongst individual group members for a collectively brought about outcome. I found that responsibility assignments were highly influenced by the causal structure and the counterfactual dependencies holding within the group. Heather Goldsby Michigan State University, USA Heather Goldsby is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research interests involve using digital evolution to study the evolution of cooperative behavior in humans and other organisms. In digital evolution models, agents compete for limited resources, replicate to produce offspring, and are subject to mutations during replication. Survival strategies differ in terms of their complexity, execution time, and also suitability for the artificial environment. These differences lead to the success (replication) or failure (death) of the agent. As such, digital evolution has the potential to select for problem-solving heuristics for any simulated agent. Her current research uses a combination of digital evolution models, game theoretic models, and psychological studies to explore how people solve leadership coordination problems. Specifically, she is investigating why individuals chose to be followers given the significantly larger rewards for leadership. Andreas Graefe University of Karlsruhe, Germany Andreas holds German diploma in economics as well as information science. In May 2009, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the predictive performance of prediction markets compared to alternative judgmental forecasting methods. In particular, he compared prediction markets to traditional face-to-face meetings, nominal groups, and the Delphi method. Since January 2008, Andreas is visiting the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he was involved in the PollyVote project to predict the outcome of last year’s U.S. Presidential Election. His current research interests include combining forecasts, the predictive power of unit-weighting models as an alternative to multiple regression, as well as using search query data for inferential decision-making and trend forecasting. Martin Hohnisch University of Bonn, Germany Martin Hohnisch works at the University of Bonn in the research group of Professor R. Selten. He received graduate degrees (Diplom) in physics (Munich TU) and economics (Bonn U), and a PhD degree in economics from Bamberg U. His current research focuses on cognitive foundations of decision-making in complex economic environments. Farnaz Kaighobadi Florida Atlantic University, USA Farnaz Kaighobadi is a doctoral candidate in Evolutionary Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. She completed her undergraduate studies at Shahid Beheshti Univerisity, Tehran, Iran and received her Master’s degree at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interests include human sexual behavior, mating strategies and sexual conflict, in general. She is currently investigating menstrual cycle effects on women’s cognitive abilities including attention to consensual sex and rape-related stimuli. Farnaz is planning to expand her research on menstrual cycle effects, by modeling women’s use of simple heuristics in making adaptive mating decisions across the menstrual cycle. James Kajdasz Ohio State University, USA I'm a PhD student in Quantitative Psychology at the Ohio State University. My studies are sponsored by the Air Force Institute of Technology as part of the United States Air Force Academy faculty training pipeline where I will eventually return to teach and conduct research in the Department of Behavioral Sciences. Studying judgment and decision making under Dr Hal Arkes, my academic interests involve applying methods developed in the social sciences to study problems faced by military intelligence analysis. Applications include the study of what characteristics affect the quality of our analytical judgments, what’s the best way to organize a group of intelligence analysts working together, and how to mathematically model intelligence diagnostic questions. It's my hope that providing key decision makers with accurate information about the world around them can help prevent misunderstandings and unnecessary conflict. Esther Kaufmann University of Mannheim, Germany Esther Kaufmann studied Psychology at the University of Zurich. Her diploma thesis focused on online research (see Internet-based measurement of social desirability, Kaufmann & Reips, 2008). In 2007, she joined the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. Her initiated PhD thesis "Flesh on the bones: A critical meta-analytic perspective on lens studies" is supervised by Wittmann. In her study Esther Kaufmann is highly motivated to find out how well people judge. Are there any differences between areas? How well do experienced doctors judge in relation to business experts? (For more information see Kaufmann, Sjödahl, Athanasou & Wittmann, Brunswik Society Newsletter, 2008). Hence, her research interests are cognitive psychology, meta-analysis (Hunter-Schmidt approach), research approaches: Idiographic vs. nomothetic approaches and symmetrical concepts. Most of her research interests are inspired by Brunswik, Hammond and Wittmann. Steffen Keck INSEAD, France I am a second-year doctoral candidate in the decision science department at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. Before beginning my PhD I studied economics at the University of Bamberg and Operational Research at the London School of Economics. My current research focuses on individual and group decision making. In particular I am interested in directly comparing the performance and the decision making processes of groups and individuals across a variety of tasks. The other main area I am interested in is to explore the effects of different mechanisms of social influence on individuals’ behaviour and preferences. Reuben Kline University of California Irvine, USA I am currently a PhD candidate in Political Science (with a concentration in Political Economy/Public Choice) and a graduate fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. I hold Master’s degrees in both Mathematical Behavioral Sciences (2009, UCI) and Economics (Pompeu Fabra, 2004). I am interested in many aspects of political economy—especially the dynamics of party competition and party identification, social choice and voting power, electoral systems, comparative democratization and development, the political economy of corruption, the evolution of norms and the measurement of public opinion. I am also interested in mathematical modeling in the social sciences more generally, including social networks, agent-based modeling, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory. Peter Kriss Carnegie Mellon University, USA The goal of my current work is to shed light on how the rules governing self-interested behavior, especially communication and disclosure, can be shaped to improve complex group outcomes. Endogenous Costly Communication and Equilibrium SelectionIn this project we examine the effects of communication in a simple coordination game with two equilibria, one that is Pareto optimal and one that is risk dominant. Contrary to the assumptions of some theorists, we expect that even a low cost associated with communication will result in outcomes that sometimes differ dramatically from those with costless communication. Does Valuation Disclosure Help or Hurt the Economy?Trends in financial reporting have led to a greater inclusion of public fair value estimates. While often cited as improving market efficiency, we ask whether fair value disclosures, because they are estimates that contain noise, may actually lead to underconfidence and industry-wide value destruction. Wen-Hsiang Lai Feng Chia University, Taiwan Dr. Wen-Hsiang Lai received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Kansas, USA in 1999. After receiving his PhD, Dr. Lai was employed in an IT company, Intech TWN, for 6 years (1999-2005). Currently Dr. Lai is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Management of Technology at Feng Chia University in Taiwan. His academic research mainly focuses on the areas of R&D management in Taiwan’s enterprises, such as the fields of technology transfer, R&D alliance, optimization of knowledge accumulation and engineering outsourcing, university-industry collaboration, and R&D performance evaluation. His research often adapts quantitative methods, such as the optimization calculation, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP), fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (fuzzy MCDM), and some other statistical methods to analyze research data collected from questionnaires and interviews. Most of his teaching courses are focused on the topics of management, and the concept of bounded rationality on psychology and economics can certainly enrich the teaching contents in the fields of R&D management, innovation management and new product development, technology transfer, knowledge management, etc. Venkat Lakshminarayanan Yale University, USA I am a 3rd year graduate student in Cognitive Psychology. I investigate the evolutionary origins of economic behavior by studying trading decisions in non-human primates. Broadly, I am interested how humans -- whose ability to make adaptive economic decisions evolved from ancestrally-related primates -- reason about risk-taking, ownership, and altruism. Observing human-like economic heuristics in primates suggest that these tendencies are evolutionarily quite ancient, and indicates that these strategies may have been in place in our evolutionary ancestors. Furthermore, this research suggests that economic decision-making enlists simple -- even primitive -- cognitive capacities that may have been well-adapted to ancient rather than modern decision-making settings - thus, challenging the notion that they are "irrational" in our own species. James Marcus Fordham University, USA I am currently a PhD student in Psychometrics at Fordham University in New York and am an alumnus of the Quantitative Psychology program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. My research has run the gamut of studying the neural basis of reward in rats, the effect of decision aids on commercial pilots’ performance, eliciting cooperation in the prisoners’ dilemma game, and analyzing the accuracy of intelligence analysts’ forecasts. At present, I am involved in a research project exploring a new method for constructing isoprobability contours (contours of points with the same cumulative probability) by eliciting pairwise preferences over binary gambles and using those contours to assess joint probability distributions of continuous random variables. Jolie Martin Harvard University, USA Jolie is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation, working with an interdisciplinary group to study Trust, Emotion, Ethics, and Morality. She currently also serves as an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2008, Jolie received her PhD in Science, Technology, & Management (a joint program between Harvard Business School and Computer Science department). She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School (2005) and a BA in Computing & Information Systems, Math, Integrated Science, and International Studies from Northwestern University (2001). Jolie’s experimental and field-based research explores various aspects of judgment and decision-making, including preferences for risk in experience, sharing of opinions in social networks, and the impact of interface design on user perceptions. Milica Milosavljevic California Institute of Technology, USA Stephanie Müller University of Granada, Spain I am a pre-doctoral researcher at Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada. Prior to my PhD, I graduated in social sciences at the University of Mannheim (Germany) and completed a master in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Granada (Spain). During my first year, I analyzed the influence of previous causal knowledge on judgment and decision making, the role of information search and whether judgments and decisions could be explained within one model. I am also interested in medical decision making and especially the communication of health risk. My further interest lies in moral decision making and whether moral reasoning is learnable depending on the available information and structure of society. Johannes Müller-Trede Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Johannes Müller-Trede is currently in the second year of his PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Robin Hogarth at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. The first part of his doctoral thesis investigates decision-makers whose utility judgments (i.e. their subjective forecasts of how happy they will be with different alternatives) are subject to random errors. The thesis shows that in such an environment, utility maximisation may give rise to systematic patterns in behaviour, and that a number of so-called biases from the decision-making literature are consistent with this idea. At the moment, Johannes is working on how this concept relates to bounded rationality, and to intertemporal decision-making. Ralitza Nikolaeva ISCTE, Portugal Ralitza Nikolaeva is currently an Assistant Professor of Marketing at ISCTE-Instituto Universitario de Lisboa. Previously she held a tenure-track position with the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and a short visiting position with GISMA (German International School of Management and Administration) in Hanover. Dr. Nikolaeva received her PhD from the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. Her research examines evolutionary issues in e-commerce and their strategic implications. Dr. Nikolaeva’s scholarly research has appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and International Journal of Electronic Commerce among others. She has presented at international conferences organized by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), and the European Association of Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE). Dr. Nikolaeva serves as an ad hoc referee for several e-commerce and marketing scholarly journals. Nathaniel Phillips Ohio University, USA I am interested in descriptive models of dynamic impression formation when individuals have access to both descriptive and experiential information relevant to a decision. I have recently proposed a mathematical model to describe these processes as a function of the relative credibility of descriptive to experiential information. Additionally, I am interested in how motivated reasoning affects the relationship between memory and judgments. Specifically, I am interested in how biased memory processing affects source monitoring judgments for stimuli whose content varies in desirability. Penny Pierce University of Michigan, USA Dr. Pierce is the lead faculty of the Decision Science in Health Care Interest Group at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. She directs doctoral and postdoctoral students as well as faculty in the study of patient and provider decision making processes in the health care environment. This forum systematically addresses salient decision problems in various contexts, health states, illnesses or disabilities, and cultures across the lifespan. The primary focus is directed toward advancing the science of decision making in health care to ultimately enhance our understanding of decision behaviors in various contexts that will enable practitioners to intervene in the most troublesome and problematic circumstances patients and their families face in contemporary health care. Sabine Pittnauer University of Bonn, Germany Sabine Pittnauer works at the University of Bonn in the research group of Professor R. Selten. She received a graduate degree (Diplom) in economics from Bonn U, where currently she is submitting her PhD thesis (title: Topics in Bounded Rationality). Her research focuses on cognitive foundations of decision-making in complex economic environments. Daniel Reichman Tel Aviv University, Israel I'm a 3rd year PhD student in Organizational Behavior in Tel Aviv University. I hold Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Open University. I hold Master in computer science and applied mathematics from the Weizmann institute of Science. I'm interested in automatic processes, motivation, social cognition, and applications of theoretical computer science to psychology and economics. Jan Ries Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany I am a student research assistant at Humboldt University Berlin, working in a research program on the nature of mathematical thinking. Currently, I am in the midst of conducting experiments for my final thesis, dealing with information reduction in a geometrical task with abstract patterns. I am comparing learning effects and use of strategies of high school students ranging from average giftedness to superior mathematical proficiency. We use hi-speed eye tracking systems for measuring pupil size as a parameter for cognitive resource consumption as well as monitoring eye movement. My research interests extend into questions on the relation of motivation and performance; “task-engagement” being a concept of vast interest for my research, both conceptually and as an influencing variable for pupillary measures. I am also interested in social cognition, specifically the role of cognitive performance in social problems. Philipp Schmitt Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany I studied Business and Political Science at the University of Mannheim and spent two semesters at the Zicklin School of Business and one semester at the Columbia Business School as a Fulbright student. I also worked four years for Dresdner Bank. Since February 2008 I am a Ph.D student in the marketing department of Goethe University Frankfurt. From January to May 2009 I spent time at the Stern School of Business and at the Wharton School. My research interests are customer management and managerial decision-making. One of my current research projects focuses on the usage of managerial heuristics in the context of decisions based on customer metrics. The goal is to find out how the usage and decision quality of such heuristics is affected by the characteristics of the decision task, decision maker and decision environment. This should help to understand how heuristics work and when and why they succeed in a key domain of management practice. Joanna Schug Hokkaido University, Japan Joanna studies at the department of Behavioral Science at Hokkaido University, Japan. Her main research interest focuses on re-examining cultural differences in psychological functioning and behavior as ecologically rational strategies adapted to the nature of specific socio-ecological environments, rather than simply as differences in culturally instilled preferences. In particular, her research focuses on the ways in which the nature of the social environment, specifically the costs of social exclusion associated with the ability (and lack of ability) to form new relationships and obtain resources outside of current relationships, can affect the costs and benefits associated with different types of interpersonal behaviors. For example, with Toshio Yamagishi she found that the “preference” for conformity in Japan could be more logically explained in terms of a default strategy geared toward avoiding negative reputation. Using this perspective, she is currently conducting research examining cultural differences in relationship maintenance strategies and cross-national trust. Natalia Shestakova Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic I am a PhD candidate at CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Prague). My primary research concerns adaptation of bounded rationality in consumer behavior to the price discrimination theory. I focus on the environment where prior to the consumption of a homogenous good a consumer has to select a pricing scheme that would determine her future expenses. Consumers behaving like humans rather than all-the-time-optimizing robots are likely to make mistakes in the pricing scheme choice. Profit-maximizing firms gain from mistakes associated with overpaying but lose from those associated with subsequent inefficient consumption. In both cases, the presence of boundedly rational consumers requires certain adjustments in pricing strategies. Such adjustments are impossible without understanding clearly why and how deviations from full rationality occur. This is the point where I appeal to the fast and frugal heuristics approach to bounded rationality. Julia Stauf University of Cologne, Germany I hold a Diploma in economics from Bonn University, where I wrote my thesis in experimental economics under the supervision of Prof. Selten. After working on entrepreneurial decision making as a doctoral student at Humboldt-University Berlin for one year, I now continue my doctoral studies as a member of Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences. My current research interests focus on decision making under uncertainty in social contexts. Boris Surija University of Zagreb, Croatia While developing research on the new measures for capturing affective component of attitudes, I became intrigued by the overall influence of emotions - and also became convinced that people are auto-piloting through life and that that auto-pilot can be defined as unconscious emotions. Also, while thinking that conscious is just a small active part of the unconsciousness I am becaming increasingly interested in role of self as an emotional-cognitive reference for (un)consciousness judge (or how do we want to call ourselves) to evaluate all stimulus and respond adequately. All mentioned is occupying me currently. If I need to focus more on research in this biosketch then I would say that with my colleagues I am trying to find processing correlates of self-report measures of personality via the affective priming paradigm and sketching design for investigating heuristics in style attributions in history of art. Renata Suter University of Basel, Switzerland For a lot of choices we have to make, we do not know for sure which of the possible outcomes we will experience. The focus of my research lies on how to model the information processing steps that precede a risky choice. The question thereby is how people use outcome and probability information to construct a preference between two risky options and particularly what heuristics people use and which conditions trigger the different heuristics. Furthermore, I am interested in examining how affect impacts the cognitive processes in risky choice, specifically, how choices between options with affect neutral outcomes differ from choices that involve affect rich outcomes. The second topic I am working on is moral decision making with a focus on the role of intuitive and deliberative processes in moral judgments. Furthermore, I investigate the influence that the environment has on these judgments. Momme von Sydow University of Göttingen, Germany I am a post-doctoral researcher with a background in cognitive psychology, philosophy and evolutionary biology. I have studied both philosophy and psychology, and obtained a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Durham, with a dissertation on different Darwinian Paradigms and a reconstruction and critique of Darwinian Metaphysics. In 2003, I started to work in a DFG project on categorisation and induction (Göttingen, Professor Michael Waldmann). I obtained a PhD in psychology, working on the Bayesian and deontic logic of testing descriptive and prescriptive rules. Subsequently, I was granted my own DFG project on knowledge-based Bayesian models of hypothesis testing. I develop rational models of higher cognition, including hypothesis testing, information selection, and reasoning. Currently, I focus on Bayesian logic, a rational model of logical probability judgments and conjunction fallacies. I aim to integrate Bayesian logic with causal Bayes-nets. Additionally, I investigate heuristics in causal reasoning. David Tannenbaum University of California Irvine, USA First, how people derive information from the decisions of others that helps them to answer basic interpersonal questions: "Can I trust this person?" "Should I expect cooperation or defection on a joint activity?" Additionally, my research also examines the accuracy of such inferences by comparing them to the information that decision-makers reveal when they make decisions. Since people do things often with the intention of broadcasting or concealing information about themselves, and other people understand this, the process of information acquisition for social behavior plays out in interesting ways (especially for moral decisions). Second, I have also examined how policy decisions (such a country's default rules for organ donations) convey information to the public. The basic idea here is that sometimes we look to the structure of the policies themselves--asking why policy makers made the decisions that they did--in order to help us inform our own choices. Andranik Tumasjan Technical University of Munich, Germany Andranik Tumasjan is a doctoral student in management at TUM Business School. He holds a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Munich (LMU), specializing in economic psychology, organizational behavior, and marketing. His research focuses on decision-making in economic contexts, particularly in strategic management and entrepreneurship. Specifically, he investigates how psychological distance dimensions and mental construal level influence choices and induce changes of preferences. Furthermore, he is interested in the role of affect and emotion in decision-making. Scott Wiltermuth Stanford University, USA My research explores how individuals behave and perform in groups and dyads. In my first area of research, I investigate specifically how interpersonal dynamics, such as dominance, submissiveness, physical synchrony, and perceived advantage, affect performance by altering how effectively individuals coordinate their actions in groups and negotiating dyads. My dissertation examines whether dominance complementarity, or the tendency for people to respond to dominance with submissiveness and submissiveness with dominance, might help negotiators create value. I reason that the hierarchy introduced by such dominance complementarity may help negotiators to coordinate their search for sources of joint gain. In a second area of research, I explore how people view and judge others’ morality. Projects in this area examine how social networks can lead people to overestimate support for their views on ethical issues and how distinct conceptions of morality can lead people to take differing views of the value of positive moral behaviors. Isabell Winkler University of Chemnitz, Germany I am a postdoctoral student at the University of Chemnitz, Germany (Department of Psychology). As a fellow of the ‘Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes’, I recently received my doctoral degree. Within my dissertation project in cognitive psychology, I analyzed how people judge the durations and frequencies of events. A special focus of this research was the impact of attentional factors on duration and frequency judgments as well as the heuristics used when attentional resources were reduced by simultaneous processing demands. My postdoctoral research will concentrate on the factors influencing subjective time perception. Due to the use of different time cues and based on individual learning processes, duration judgments differ for varying situations and between individuals. I will examine the conditions under which time intervals are over- or underestimated as well as changes in time perception across the life span. Simon Zehnder University of Bonn, Germany My main research interests within my PhD studies can be found in the field of Market Microstructure. Therein, I consider the order setting behaviour of market participants at electronic financial markets (XETRA, Frankfurt). This research objective can be splitted into three main parts: a statistical part, where I try to fit the order distributions by a ML-Approach; a theoretical part, where I collect main findings of theoretical literature on order setting and compare them to the empirical observations and a behavioral approach, in which I take data from an experiment with an electronical market and compare these findings to the empirically observed ones from the XETRA market. As the order setting on financial markets deserve mainly fast decisions, I want to consider a heuristical approach which could perhaps explain the empirical findings much better than statistical or theoretical models. Up to now, I think about different approaches to this subject, and I hope to get a further focus on one of them from my participationn in the abc Summer Institute in Berlin.
|