The UK Met Office has given storms forenames for the past decade as part of an effort to raise public awareness of extreme weather before it strikes. Heatwaves are becoming increasingly frequent and severe due to greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly from burning fossil fuel, which are raising global temperatures by trapping more heat in Earth’s atmosphere. These...
Centre of Decision Research members made 5 presentations at the recent Euro 2025 conference in Leeds, and were also co-authors on a further 4 presented by others. See a list of the presentations below. Multinomial Decision Making (MNDM): A new Multi Criteria Decision Analysis based on random utility theory. - David Palma, Richard Hodgett, Sajid Siraj & Romain...
Thanks to Simon van Baal for conducting a successful four-day in-person workshop: Webtext2Insight. We had external participants from the UK, US, France, Norway, Denmark, and Australia. This workshop provided hands-on training in web scraping, natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI using state-of-the-art Python tools. Many of the attendees were new to Python, or had never even done...
David Palma attended the Transportation Research Symposium Conference in Rotterdam. Showcasing his poster titled: Semi-parametric approximation of spatial correlation matrix among observations in multinomial discrete choice models. Abstract: Spatial correlation is a well-known fact in geography, yet its treatment in econometric models is far from simple, involving convoluted and computationally intensive implementations, and difficult-to-interpret results....
The research team attempted to find out how people make big life decisions, using advice-seeking posts on online forums. They used LLMs to extract the choice options and the reasons for both (like a pros/cons list) and then mapped those onto a list of theory-derived attributes (e.g., risk, time, relationships, career, finance, etc). They show...
Abstract Finding ways to steer consumers' food choices towards vegetarian and plant-based meals is important to reduce our diets' environmental impact. This paper investigates how nudges in restaurants can be effectively used to increase sales of vegetarian and plant-based dishes. We partnered with two restaurants, which can host up to 130 guests in total and...
CDR member Joshua Weller delivered the invited Khodadad Lecture at the University of Cincinnati Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience (https://med.uc.edu/). This prestigious, endowed lectureship is held annually to present state-of-the-art research to faculty (psychiatrists and psychologists) and trainees (residents and medical students). Dr. Weller’s lecture, titled “The Psychology of Dispositional Greed,” explored...
CDR member Simon van Baal has received an AFSG Minor Exploratory Grant Funding (https://afsg.org/funding/). Together with his colleagues, Philip Newall and Lukasz Walasek, Simon will examine how scores on the main measurement tool for gambling harm (Problem Gambling Severity Index) relate to real-life experiences of gambling. At the moment, an arbitrary cut-off is used to...
Abstract We study attention utility, the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information, which differs from the news utility that arises from gaining new information. The main, field, study examines brokerage account login data to show that investors pay disproportionate attention to already-known positive information on their stocks. Through its effect...
A Massive Congratulation to Richard Hodgett who has been listed in the Poets&Quants 2025 Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors, along with Professors from other top schools including MIT, Harvard, INSEAD, LBS, Wharton etc. Richard has been with CDR since 2014, making a great contribution to our research and teaching. See the full article here: Poets&Quants |...
