Research
My current research examines how people integrate information to estimate value and make decisions.
Generally, I think about questions like these:
1. What shapes our decisions in uncertain situations, when we know we don't have all the information we need?
2. How do we manage all the different kinds of information in retail settings to make purchasing decisions?
3. How do we think about timing in decision-making, and choices about how to "spend" time?
1. Uncertainty (Partial/Insufficient Information)
A range of decisions, including financial and medical choices, involve uncertainty, often arising from imperfect or “incomplete” knowledge. I study how people think about uncertainty, and how the information that is available influences their feelings of certainty and perceptions of value.
We can think about two "levels" of uncertainty - risk and ambiguity. In risky decisions, the outcome is unknown, but we have information about the probabilities of a preferred or unpreferred outcome (e.g. heads vs. tails in a fair coin flip). In ambiguity, like in most real world choice, we don't know the outcomes and we don't know the probabilities. In these settings, we may have some relevant information about the likelihood of a desired outcome, but it's often partial or incomplete. So we developed the "Pro/Con" task, which is the first behavioral economics task to examine the relative contribution of partial “favorable” information (supporting a desired outcome) to “unfavorable” information (opposing a desired outcome) in estimating value under ambiguity. Using this paradigm, we're exploring how different kinds of information lead to biases when we make decisions in ambiguous contexts. One interesting setting for this work is online decision-making and cybersecurity, where uncertainty intersects with trust.
2. Shopping Decisions (Plenty of Information)
In most retail situations, we have all the information we might need to make a purchase - and more! The challenge becomes integrating or managing all the possible influences and signals we get so that we can make choices about how to spend our money. The importance of context and framing on decision-making is well known by now via the science of choice architecture. Along those lines this stream of research looks at how the presentation of information in a shopping setting (e.g. other items in a product display, types of options in a choice set, sequence of events during a decision) alters both our preferences (what we like) and our decisions (what we buy).
3. Timing, and "spending" time
If we think of decision-making as a process that unfolds over time, several interesting questions arise. For example, does the sequence in which information is experienced change how we calculate value? Can time away from a decision change the way we use decision-relevant information? And how do we make decisions about the way we spend our time as a resource? Much of my early career neuroscience research was about how the brain measures time, including neural mechanisms related to estimating very short intervals.
