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
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
2010
A Knowledge Transfer Partnership recently completed by Professor Klaus
Schenk-Hoppé (Accounting & Finance Division) and 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.
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.
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