What is Decision Research?
Decision Research focuses on the way individuals, groups and organisations make decisions. It involves perspectives that are:
- Descriptive - why and how decisions are made the way they are,
- Normative - how decisions should be made in some ideal sense, and
- Prescriptive - how can decision making be made more effective.
It is concerned with how people make judgments and take decisions,particularly in situations involving risk and uncertainty. The research has provided important insights into how and why people do what they do, why they make mistakes that can lead to poor outcomes for themselves and their organisations, and how we can use this knowledge to help them do it better.
Theories and findings from decision research have been applied extensively in such areas as political science, finance, marketing,health, medicine, management and the law. These applications have provided important insights into how decisions are taken in these areas, some of the errors and mistakes made by people, including experts, and how to improve these decisions.
The Centre
Founded in March 1996, the Centre brings together researchers from across the University of Leeds, and other local Universities, who have an interest in human decision making. Its strong multi-disciplinary focus has led to research collaborations across a wide range of disciplines e.g. Computer Studies, Business and Management, Psychology, Philosophy, Transport Studies, Health Studies, Medicine, Civil Engineering, Geography, Law, Education. Despite the different fields of application, much of this work is based on a broadly shared theoretical and methodological core.
Members of the Centre carry out a broad range of research, much of it funded externally, publish extensively in academic journals, edited books and practitioner journals, as well as presenting at major national and international conferences. In addition, they teach on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, supervise doctoral students and run a broad range of short courses for professionals on various aspects of human judgment and decision making. These courses include general introductions that provide participants with insights about how they currently make decisions, some of the errors and biases inherent in what they do and how they can improve by using better ways of thinking and structured decision aids. In addition,members run specialist courses that are targeted on specific topics and professions e.g. behavioural finance for financial services professionals, consumer decision making for marketing professionals,risk communication for health, food and security service professionals.
Left to right: John Maule, Alan Pearman, Darren Duxbury, Barbara Summers, Elisa Barilli (Visiting Research Assistant), Yanan Feng (PhD student), Nicola Bown
Click here to listen to Emeritus Professor John Maule talking about Understanding and Improving Decision Making
Activities
This network of researchers is active in undertaking collaborative research and consulting work, both nationally and internationally, drawing on and combining the range of skills and facilities available within the University. The Centre has hosted a number of larger-scale conferences. Members of the Centre also engage in a range of teaching and training activities. These include: training in decision making skills for police officers, senior doctors and business professionals from many sectors; training in risk communication for a range of Government agencies. In addition, each of the Business School's MBA courses contains a module on Management Decision Making, covering both process and modelling aspects of decision support within organisations.
News
2012
CDR welcomes Wändi Bruine de Bruin, who will be taking the position as Chair of Behavioural Decision Research in September. She will be joining us from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), where she still holds a position in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. She has a Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Theory and Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and an M.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology from the Free University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Her research interests include individual differences in decision-making competence across the life span, risk perception and communication, financial decision making, health decision making, and environmental decision making. Her research aims to understand how people make decisions about the risks affecting their health and finances, how to develop communications to improve those decisions, and how people vary in their abilities to make decisions. She has recently edited a special issue on decision-making competence for the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, for which she also serves on the editorial board. She has published in peer-reviewed journals in multiple disciplines, including psychology, environmental science, economics, and public health. She has contributed her expertise to advisory panels and workshops organized by various organizations, including the U.S. Centers of Disease Control, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Dutch Central Bank, and the U.S. National Research Council.
Barbara Summers gave a Keynote Speech about emotions and decision making at the conference Regulation and Responsibility: Analysing Behaviour in a Business Environment, held at the Open University on 12th January 2012.
CDR welcomes Andrea Taylor, who is working with us as a post-doctoral researcher. Andrea has recently completed her PhD at the University of Bolton, where she investigated the influence of numeracy and affect on adherence to rational choice principles in decisions under risk. Coming from a cognitive psychology background, her research interests include numeracy and choice, the role of emotion in decision making, information processing in decisions under risk and uncertainty and decisions regarding personal finance.
2011
John Maule is one of those commenting in the Sunday Telegraph article “EU treaty: the tactics designed to wear David Cameron down” (11/12/11), which discusses negotiating at the recent EU Summit.
- L-R Alena Audzeyeva, Eloise Stott, Lucy Marshall, Barbara Summers
The Knowledge Transfer Partnership completed by Klaus Schenk-Hoppé (Accounting & Finance Division) and Barbara Summers with Clydesdale Bank (“To develop and implement Customer Lifetime Value measures to support the decision making processes around customer product offerings and the service proposition”, Associate - Alena Audzeyeva) has received ESRC award for 'Best Application of Social Science in a KTP 2011'.
The application of Customer Lifetime Value models marks a major shift to a customer-focused rather than product-focused approach to the customer relationship. Groups of customers with similar characteristics and needs can be distinguished, and provided with information and product offerings that are focused on their needs. This deeper understanding of customers allows the Bank to respond in a more tailored way to customers, building direct mail and call centre campaigns around the most appropriate communications for each customer, rather than giving everyone the same message.
“Choosing to do the project as a KTP allowed us to search for an innovative solution and gave us the luxury of accessing the academic skills we didn’t possess. Not only did it resolve a business
need, it strengthened the relationship with the University and was
personally rewarding for all those involved in the project.”
Lucy Marshall, Clydesdale Bank plc.
Alan Pearman recently served again in Brussels as an Evaluator with the European Commission Research Executive Agency, working on the Career Integration Grant stream of the Marie Curie FP-PEOPLE programme.
Alan Pearman was recently appointed to serve as a reviewer for the Danish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education Council for Strategic Research’s Programme Committee on Transport and Infrastructure.
Alan Pearman recently attended the latest meeting of the Electricity Working Group of the European Commission’s North-South Interconnections in Central-Eastern Europe project. Held at the Ministry of Economy in Warsaw and opened by the Deputy Minister, Alan’s presentation to the meeting concerned the multi-criteria analysis developed and applied to rank proposals for investment put forward by the ten countries concerned.
Abdulrahman Alkhorayef and Alan Pearman presented a paper, A Decision Research Perspective on the Management of Megaprojects, at the 53rd Annual Conference of the Operational Research Society, held at the University of Nottingham, from 6th – 8th. September 2011.
Barbara Summers is to be on the Scientific Committee for the SPUDM 24 Conference in Barcelona in 2013. SPUDM (Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making) is the conference of the European Association for Decision Making (EADM).
The Centre for Decision Research, jointly with the AIMTech Research Group in LUBS, recently hosted a very successful visit from Professor Chun-wei Choo of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Professor Choo presented a research seminar: Risky Decisions: Information and the enactment of meaning, knowledge and decisions, attended by a wide range of researchers from across the University. He also ran a workshop for PhD students on publication strategies for young researchers (see photo). During his visit, a number of potential research collaborations were discussed linking information behaviour, sense-making and decision making.
Alan Pearman is leading the Leeds input to a European Commission financed research project, Market Analysis and Priorities for Future Development of the Electricity Market and Infrastructure in Central-Eastern Europe under the North-South Energy Interconnections Initiative. The project is led by the Milan office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, with Leeds inputting to the analysis and evaluation of potential new cross-border connections.
Barbara Summers was a panelist for the discussion at the NEST/TUC event Reactions to volatility and loss: The potential impact of loss aversion on 19th July in London. NEST is the new national, low-cost pension scheme set up by the Pensions Act 2008, which can be used by employers in fulfilling their duties under the Act. This event presented research by Opinion Leader (to which Barbara contributed) and DCisions on reactions to investment loss in a pension context and considered its implications for NEST.
Alan Pearman chaired a session at the 19th Triennial Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (INFORS), held in Melbourne from 10th – 15th July. He also presented a paper, Stakeholder Preference Mapping – helping understand how to process spent nuclear fuel. Co-authors were Grace McGlynn and Gregg Butler of Integrated Decision Management.
CDR welcomes Omair Jamal, who is joining us on a LUBS Research Internship. Omair has just finished his second year of a BSc in Economics and Management at Leeds University Business School. During his time here Omair is working with members of the Centre on a project exploring the impact of ‘nudge’ strategies in financial decisions such as pension saving. These strategies are based on work by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein reviewed in their book: “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness”.
Barbara Summers has been elected as Member at Large on the Executive Board of the European Association for Decision Making (EADM) for the period 2011-2013.
David Allen and Alan Pearman recently hosted a joint AIMTech/Centre for Decision Research visit from Kees Nieuwenhuis and Sorin Iacob from Thales Nederland BV and the D-CIS laboratory in Delft.
D-CIS is a partnership involving, among others, Thales Nederland, Delft University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Tilburg. Drs Nieuwenhuis and Iacob are both also visiting members of staff in Leeds University Business School. With operations in 50 countries and 68,000 employees, Thales is a world leader in mission-critical information systems for defence and security, aerospace and transportation.
During the three-day visit to Leeds, a number of potential avenues for research collaboration were explored. In September 2011, a joint seminar will be organised, bringing together individuals from organisations with a shared interest in the impact of cognitive bias on the analysis of intelligence information in various settings.
CDR will be presenting 5 studies at SPUDM, the major European conference for decision making, taking place in August. The work applies decision research in a number of areas as well as exploring decision making per se. The studies are:
- Identifying components of decision aid interventions that enable informed decision making about dialysis modality.
Teresa Gavaruzzi, Barbara Summers., Gary Latchford., Andrew Mooney, Anne Stiggelbout, Martin Wilkie, Anna Winterbottom, Hilary Bekker. - Information use and decision making by Silver Commanders in the Emergency Services
Jyoti Mishra, David Allen and Alan Pearman - Framing effects and cognitive reflection
Darren Duxbury, Barbara Summers and Santiago Garcia Rodriguez - Visualization cognitive style, numeracy and decision making
Santiago Garcia Rodriguez, Barbara Summers, Darren Duxbury - Influences on the ethical reasoning of tax tractitioners: Exploring the individual, the context and professional socialization
Elaine Doyle, Jane Frecknall-Hughes, and Barbara Summers
The fulltime Leeds MBA 2010-11 cohort and students on the Executive Programme attended the three day Management Decision Making optional module of their programme 4th-6th April, delivered by Barbara Summers, Alan Pearman and Nicola Bown from CDR. Students also benefitted from the input of guest speaker, Richard Bartholomew, Head of Risk Management, EMEA, Northern Trust, who gave a fascinating insight into risk management and communication in Northern Trust during the recent economic climate.
In March, Nicola Bown gave an invited presentation to Ilkley Business Forum on “Understanding and Improving Human Judgment and Decision Making” at their monthly meeting. The audience was made up about 30 owners/directors of SMEs in the West and North Yorkshire Region.
http://www.ilkleybusinessforum.co.uk/
2010
From 13th – 17th December 2010, Alan Pearman served as one of six members of the international review panel, commissioned to evaluate the research strategy and performance of the Department of Transport at the Danish Technical University.
John Maule gave a keynote address to the Financial Services Research Forum Autumn Seminar, Central Hall, Westminster, London: November 2010. The title of his talk was ‘Mind over money matters: how mental accounting affects financial choice’.
Between 25th and 29th October, Alan Pearman served in Brussels as an Evaluator for the European Commission Research Executive Agency for the FP-PEOPLE programme, assessing the current round of applications for funding under the Marie Curie International and European Reintegration grants.
CDR welcomes Abdulrahman Alkhorayef who joins us to study for his PhD. Abdulrahman’s general research interest lies in decision making about very large scale investment projects (“mega-projects”). Why do a substantial proportion of such projects significantly over-run on time and/or cost and sometimes fail to deliver the expected return on their investment? Are there particular elements of the decision making about such projects that can be identified and undertaken better?
Abdulrahman's academic background consists of an honours Bachelors degree in Business Administration (2007) from Al-Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMAMU) Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; also, he obtained a Master of Business Administration (Decision Making and Management Consultancy) (2010) from Leeds University Business School. During his studies, he has awarded IMAMU’s Prize for superior students (2005, 2006 and 2007) and in 2010, he was awarded a research excellence prize from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in London. Abdulrahman’s academic career has been as a Teacher Assistant in the College of Economics and Administrative Sciences at IMAMU for three years. He has also worked with various non-profit organisations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since 1997.
In October, Nicola Bown ran a one day masterclass ("Understanding and Improving Decision Making) for senior officers of the Scottish Prison Service, held at the Scottish Prison Service College, Polmont.
Delegates were introduced to the large body of research on the thinking and reasoning processes that underlie human decision making, to demonstrate how these can, on occasions, lead to errors that can affect the quality of decision making. Delegates considered ways of overcoming these negative effects by improving thinking and reasoning and the use of structured approaches to decision aiding, and considered the implications of these issues for their decision making in prison contexts
Alan Pearman acted as joint chair of the Ex-Post Evaluation Conference on the Impacts of the Transport Projects funded under the EU Framework 5 and Framework 6 programmes, held in Brussels in September 2010.
CDR welcomes Mark Houghton, joined Leeds University Business School this September to study part time for his PhD. Mark's research is investigating the roles mental representations play in our judgments and decisions, in particular the possibility of characteristics of our mental representations of magnitude explaining some of our heuristics and biases.
Mark is an independent consultant living in Bournemouth but working internationally in organisation design and development. Marks interest in mental representations was sparked whilst working with foreign exchange and commodity traders when he noticed them making multiple references to mental representations of their profit and loss accounts.
CDR welcomes Teresa Gavaruzzi, who is joining us as a Research Fellow working on the project 'Identifying components of decision aid interventions that enable informed decision making about dialysis modality', led by Hilary Bekker (CDR/ Leeds Institute of Health Sciences). This project involves a team of experts that also includes Barbara Summers.
Teresa recently received her PhD in Psychology - Cognitive Sciences from the University of Padova, Italy, and during her study she also spent a period visiting the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (USA), supervised by Angie Fagerlin. Her interests include: the study of judgment and decision making from a cognitive perspective specifically but not limited to the health and medical domain; factors affecting patients’ decision making; risk communication and risk perception.
CDR welcomes Dana Brhelova, who is joining us as a Visiting Research Assistant during the summer. Dana is studying for her Master's in Psychology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. In her master's thesis she deals with a neuropsychological task called the Iowa Gambling Task which simulates real life decision making. Within this task she focuses on decision making strategies, switching between presented choices and how decision making relates to personal characteristics. During her time here Dana is working with Barbara Summers, Darren Duxbury and John Maule on a project exploring the impact of defaults on responses to outcomes in the context of the status quo bias.
Elaine Doyle has received the award for the Best Student Paper at the AAA (American Accounting Association) Ethics Symposium for 2010. Her paper addresses the following issues: the impact of the tax context on cognitive moral reasoning; the potential for the tax profession to be attractive to people for whom a particular level of moral reasoning predominates; and the training/socialisation of practitioners in their professional context.
Professor John Maule had a letter published in The Independent on 16/8/10, “Nudge theory is only short term”. The text is online at http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-the-hs2-project-2053404.html (4th heading on page)
Dr Barbara Summers, Professor Alan Pearman, Dr Darren Duxbury, Professor John Maule and Dr Nicola Bown are currently doing work with global media agency OMD on insights from decision research literature into understanding decision making in the shopping occasion
Yanan Feng has been awarded ‘The 2009 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad’, which is China's most prestigious award for overseas students. The Chinese Scholarship Council selected 35 students from the UK this year and of these, two come from Leeds.
These awards, which started in 2003, recognise outstanding Chinese students undertaking full-time research abroad leading to a PhD in all areas of study. The applications for the award came from more than 29 countries all over the world. Award winners were from a range of disciplines, including arts, science, engineering, medicine, and business. Each winner received a $5,000 cash prize and a certificate, The Award ceremony was held on 4th May 2010 at Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in London.
Hilary Bekker (CDR/ Leeds Institute of Health Sciences) has been awarded a grant by the Foundation for Informed Decision Making, based in the USA. The research will investigate the effectiveness of different components of decision aids in terms of facilitating informed decision making using a patient decision context (decisions about dialysis in kidney patients), and thus makes an important contribution to both theory and the practical application of decision aids. Barbara Summers (CDR/ LUBS) is a co-investigator on the project along with Anne Stiggelbout (Professor in Medical Decision Making, University of Leiden), Anna Winterbottom (Senior Research Fellow, Bradford Royal Infirmary), Andrew Mooney (Consultant Nephrologist, St James’s University Hospital), Gary Latchford (Consultant Clinical Psychologist, St James’s University Hospital), and Martin Wilkie (Consultant Nephrologist, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust).
Rob Ranyard, Darren Duxbury and Barbara Summers were members of the organizing committee of a successful workshop Economic Psychology: New Methods and Findings, hosted by the Economic Psychology and Decision Research Group at the University of Bolton in late March. The workshop was sponsored by ICABEEP, a confederation of the International Association for
Research into Economic Psychology (IAREP) and the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE). Details of the programme, the abstracts booklet and written versions of the keynote addresses can be found on the workshop website: http://www.bolton.ac.uk/conferences/economicpsychology/.
Elaine Doyle, supervised by Professor Jane Frecknall Hughes (Open University), Professor Ron Hodges (University of Sheffield) and Dr Barbara Summers (CDR), passed the viva examination for her PhD in February 2010. Elaine’s thesis, which was entitled “An Empirical Analysis of the Ethical Reasoning Process of Tax Practitioners”, looked to address some of the gaps in the literature in this area by investigating the perception of ethics within the tax profession via semi-structured interviews with tax practitioners and also using a customised version of Rest’s Defining Issues Test alongside the original instrument to compare the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners and non specialists in both the social and tax contexts. She found that, while the cognitive moral development of individuals entering the tax profession is not significantly different from society at large, tax practitioners use much lower levels of moral reasoning in a work context than in a social one.
A Knowledge Transfer Partnership recently completed by Professor Klaus Schenk-Hoppé (Accounting & Finance Division) and Dr Barbara Summers with Yorkshire Bank (“To develop and implement Customer Lifetime Value measures to support the decision making processes around customer product offerings and the service proposition”, Associate - Alena Audzeyeva) has received an “outstanding” grading from the KTP Grading Panel and was awarded a KTP Certificate of Excellence.
2009
On 17th December Professor John Maule was interviewed by James Cowling on the BBC World Service programme “The World Today”. John commented on how the negotiations and decisions taken by delegates at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen were likely to be affected by time pressure. This is particularly important over the next couple of days as the deadline for agreement gets closer and time pressure mounts. John noted that delegate's thinking is likely to get simpler, more narrowly focused and less creative - all of which is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the decision taken.
Yanan Feng supervised by Dr Nicola Bown (CDR) and Professor Chris Allinson, passed the viva examination for her PhD in November 2009. Her thesis was entitled "Group decision making in a cross-cultural context: A comparison between Great Britain and China".
CDR welcomes Santiago Garcia who joins us to study for his PhD. Santiago’s general research interest lies in the interaction of affect and cognition in the decision making process. He is looking to investigate the processes whereby consumers interpret numerical information and how that impacts their affective evaluation of the task or product at hand, ultimately leading to a decision.
Santiago's academic background consists of an honours Bachelors degree in Social Psychology (Summa cum Laude) from the University of Oregon, where he also obtained a Masters of Science in Psychology (Decision Making). During his academic career Santiago was affiliated to Decision Research Institute (Eugene, OR, USA), a research organization investigating human judgment, decision-making, and risk with the aim of helping individuals and organizations understand and cope with the complex and often risky decisions of modern life. Santiago comes with industry experience from both public and private sector organizations. During the past three years he has worked in Belgium and Germany securing partnerships between international universities, corporations and government bodies.
The Centre for Decision Research and the International Institute for Banking and Financial Services have been successful in a bid to be included in the Office of Fair Trading Research Services Framework, which will run from 1 November 2009 to 31st October 2013. This is an important achievement, as under the EU Procurement Directive only organisations participating in the Framework will be invited to submit tenders for future research.
The Centre for Decision Research is providing input to research into attitudes to loss being run by Opinion Leader and PADA.
Along with former member of the CDR Merce Roca, John Maule has an article published in the latest edition of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes entitled "Demand for probabilistic information and the effects of endowment". In addition, his book "Decision behaviour, analysis and support", written jointly with Simon French and Nadia Papamichail (Manchester Business School) was published by Cambridge University Press on August 1st 2009. In late June he also gave an invited keynote address to the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making entitled "Can computers overcome limitations in human decision making?"
After a successful joint bid the Centre for Decision Research and the International Institute for Banking and Financial Services have been included in the Department for Work and Pensions Social and Economic Research Framework, which will run from 1 July 2009 for an initial period of 2 years (with a possible 2 year extension). This is an important achievement, as under the EU Procurement Directive only organisations participating in the Framework will be invited to submit tenders for future research commissioned by the DWP and HMRC.
Darren Duxbury, Rob Ranyard and Barbara Summers are co-authors (with colleagues from Italy) of a paper on perceptions of price changes and inflation, which has been awarded a highly prestigious Citation of Excellence award as one of the top papers of 2008 by Emerald Management Reviews. There are 50 awards per year (out of 15,000 papers reviewed) and awards include publications in such journals as American Economic Review, Strategic Management Journal and Journal of Finance. The paper is informing discussion in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Elisa Barilli, our Visiting Research Assistant from the University of Trento (Italy) has been awarded the EU- funded grant "Erasmus Mobility for Placements Action" dedicated to graduate and PhD students for internships in European companies or organisations. Elisa will undertake her four-month traineeship at the CDR from April to July 2009 under the supervision of Dr Barbara Summers and Professor John Maule. During the internship she will develop research skills, along with the associated analytical and administrative academic abilities, which will provide a sound basis for the development of her future career as a researcher and research leader.
Professor John Maule appeared on the Horizon documentary "How to survive a disaster", broadcast on 10th March 2009 on BBC2, contributing insights on risk perception.
2008
Purva Abhyankar, supervised by Dr Hilary Bekker and Dr Barbara Summers of CDR, passed the viva examination for her PhD in November 2008. Purva's thesis, which was entitled "Decision making about cancer treatment and clinical trial participation", explored the process of decision making on cancer trial participation with patients, and investigated the impacts of decision framing and values clarification on decision outcomes using experimental approaches. She found that informed decision making about trial participation can be enhanced by presenting the decision as an explicit choice between alternatives, providing full information prior to eliciting preferences, and using an explicit values clarification technique.
Professor Alan Pearman is leading the Leeds input to the 2 million euro TEN-connect project. This work, being undertaken for the Energy and Transport Directorate of the European Commission, is aimed at developing traffic flow forecasts for all the Trans-European transport networks and at recommending an assessment methodology to allow competing proposals for investment to be compared. Leeds is taking prime responsibility for this latter element, which incorporates both conventional cost-benefit analysis and a multi-criteria evaluation module, building on previous research carried out through CDR in conjunction with the Institute for Transport Studies.
Dr Barbara Summers, Dr Darren Duxbury, Professor John Maule and Professor Alan Pearman are currently doing work with the Department of Work and Pensions as part of the department's Auto-enrolment Project, which aims to encourage pension saving in the UK. Under auto-enrolment schemes people who enter into qualifying employment are automatically enrolled into a pension scheme (although they can choose to opt out). This approach has been found to increase pension saving in other contexts (such as US companies). The DWP commissioned survey work to investigate consumer attitudes to pensions and the auto-enrolment concept, and to look at consumer behaviour in relation to retirement saving, with CDR members acting in an expert advisory role. CDR offered advice to shape the questionnaire used and the subsequent analysis. More recently CDR has drawn on relevant research in decision science and related disciplines to highlight issues that would benefit from more in-depth investigation, helping to better understand individuals' motivations, attitudes and behaviours with respect to pension saving.
CDR welcomes Elisa Barilli, who is joining us as a Visiting Research Assistant. Elisa is studying for her PhD in Cognitive Sciences and Education at the University of Trento, Italy, and is doing research into the perception of mathematically equivalent probability formats - particularly fractions - from a cognitive perspective. Experts dealing with risk communication in the healthcare domain could benefit from the results of her work, gaining insight into the differences in patients' perceptions of risk arising from the format chosen to convey outcome uncertainty. Moreover, the results could also be applied in advertising, where the type of numerical expressions used to convey information can alter consumer perceptions of gains and losses.
Professor John Maule gave the opening address at the Information Security Forum's 19th Annual World Congress in the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya, Barcelona Spain (16 - 18 November 2008). His presentation outlined reasons why experienced security professionals often misperceive the risks to computer systems and how this can lead organisations to under-protect against some threats and over-protect against others, In addition, he considered why users of computer systems also misperceive the risks of their actions, how this can expose these systems to internal and external threats and how to facilitate better security awareness in this group of individuals.