In conjunction with the University of Sydney Workshop on Behavioural Economics: Foundations and Applied Research, Professor Graham Loomes of The University of Warwick, undertook two half-day masterclasses.
 
Different Ways of Incorporating Psychological Features into Decision Theory
Tuesday 7 November, 2 to 5 pm 2017
 
There are now more than a hundred different models of decision making under risk. But how different are/can they all be? How can we better understand the overlaps and distinctions between them and what these represent in terms of the psychological features that may be involved? In this talk, I’ll use a reasonably simple act-state framework to highlight inter-relationships between expected utility theory (EUT) and some of the more prominent alternative models. This talk will be restricted to deterministic models: variability is discussed in the second talk.
 
Incorporating Variability and Error into Decision Theories
Wednesday 8 November, 2 to 5 pm 2017
 
Ever since the earliest days of experimental studies of individual decision making under risk, it has been known that if a participant is presented with exactly the same scenario (choice or valuation) in exactly the same format on two or more occasions (sometimes separated by a few days but often only separated by a few minutes) he/she is liable to respond differently to at least some of those scenarios. In short, much decision making is probabilistic rather than deterministic. But what are the sources of such variability? How should we incorporate noise/error/imprecision into models? And what might be the implications for testing and discriminating between competing ‘core’ theories?