Congratulations to Irene Mussio, who jointly with Natalia Bulla-Holthaus and Nadja Kairies-Schwarz have a new paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics: The effects of cognitive load and mindfulness meditation on decisions related to risk and time. They examined the interaction between mindfulness meditation and cognitive load on students risk and time preferences....
Congratulations to Dr Edika Quispe-Torreblanca for winning the Deans Award - Research Excellence Award (Early Career winner). Dr Quispe-Torreblanca has been recognised with the Dean’s Research Excellence Award (Early Career) for her contributions to behavioural household finance. Her research combines real-world data, such as investor and credit card records, with experimental methods to examine how attention,...
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...
