Publications by dan
What makes a good academic conference?
WHAT WE LOOK FOR WHEN WE DECIDE We have attended hundreds of academic conferences over the years. We’ve seen all kinds of formats. We’ve heard many opinions about what’s good and bad. Here’s what we look for in an academic conference. Small – Fewer than 400 attendees is ideal. At large conferences, people get overwhelmed, retreat into...
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Society for Judgment and Decision Making: Who Are We (Part 1)
ANALYSIS OF SJDM MEMBERS’ DEPARTMENTS Over the next two posts, we’ll look at the membership of SJDM, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Next week, we’ll break down the membership by region, country, and state. This week, we look at where our members come from in terms of departments. To make the plot above, we had to do a fair...
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Part 2 of Who We Are: Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM)
WHERE THE SJDM MEMBERS ARE FROM IN THE WORLD Last week, we looked at where the Society for Judgment and Decision Making members were from in terms of academic areas. This week we look at where they’re from geographically. To start, we note that most members (1195/1714 or 70%) are from the USA. Inside the USA, there are members in 45 states, a...
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Rules of thumb to predict how long you will live
HEURISTICS FOR ESTIMATING LIFE EXPECTANCY We once learned from a doctor a rule of thumb for predicting how long a person will live (i.e., the life expectancy). The doctor’s heuristic was: (100 minus the patient’s age) divided by 2 We wanted to see how accurate this rule was, so we downloaded life expectancy data from the US government and pl...
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Getting old in baseball
BATTING AND AGING With baseball’s World Series drawing to a close, we thought we’d get in one last 2014 post on the US national pastime. Keeping up with our aging theme, we’ll look at what happens to players’ batting averages as they age. We use the Lahman package in R, which has data from 1871 to 2013. We take the set of players who pla...
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When to fly to get there on time? Six million flights analyzed.
EVERY U.S. FLIGHT IN 2013 ANALYZED (click to enlarge) If you read Decision Science News, you are probably interested in decision making, you probably fly a lot, and you probably like making decisions about flying. Big data of the type the U.S. Government provides enable us to predict how delayed we will be when we fly at various hours of the day....
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What size will you be after you lose weight?
REDDITORS’ BEFORE AND AFTER MEASUREMENTS ANALYZED Click to enlarge How many pounds do you need to lose in order to reduce your waistline by one inch? How many kilos do you need to lose to reduce your waistline by one centimeter? We wanted to find out. We were having trouble finding published data (though we are expecting some soon), so we tur...
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Visualize Prospect Theory
INTERACTIVE R TOOL FOR GRAPHING PROSPECT THEORY AND MORE Dan Wall from Columbia University’s Center for the Decision Sciences (*) writes in that he’s developed a new Web app using Shiny and RStudio. It allows users to edit Prospect Theory and Quasi-Hyperbolic Time Discounting Parameters and see the resulting changes to the graphs. Try it out...
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Decide which frequent flyer program is best for your city
INTERACTIVE TOOL TO SEE THE NUMBER OF DEPARTURES Click to access the tool We’ve posted in the past about which airline you should be loyal to, but we always felt guilty because we only showed results for the New York metro area and there are Decision Science News readers all over the USA (and all over the World too, though in most countries it...
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Put the size of countries in perspective by comparing them to US states
THE BENEFITS OF FAMILIAR UNITS This Mercator projection is famous for distorting land areas Like Jake Hofman, we at Decision Science News love putting things in perspective. Watch this space for a paper we are writing on the topic. We recently thought: Wouldn’t it be cool for US readers to see how big foreign countries are by comparing them t...
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