Friday 15 January 2010

After Christmas

Stress stress stress!

Working in a group can be very difficult, it's hard to make sure our writing flows and blends together. We all have different writing styles.

The four papers we had to look at and talk about as a group on our wiki page were:

Fox, C.R., & Hadar, L. (2006). “Decisions from experience” = sampling error + prospect theory: Reconsidering Hertwig, Barron, Weber & Erev (2004). Judgment and Decision Making, 1 (2), 159-161
Hadar, L., & Fox, C.R. (2009). Information asymmetry in decision from description versus decision from experience. Judgment and Decision Making, 4 (4), 317–325
Hertwig, R., Barron, G., Weber, E.U., & Erev, I. (2004). Decisions from experience and the effect of rare events in risky choice. Psychological Science, 15 (8), 534-539
Shafir, S., Reich, T., Tsur, E., Erev, I., & Lotem, A. (2008). Perceptual accuracy and conflicting effects of certainty on risk-taking behaviour. Nature, 453, 917-920

These were all about decisions from experience. Some of the papers compared decisions from experience with decisions from description, and the choices participants made with the two different conditions, and whether they would choose the higher expected value.

Week 11

This week we had to do our presentation.
I think we managed to make it exactly 10 minutes long, which is how long it was supposed to be.
My results section was probably the shortest speech ever! I hope that it was fine, I was very worried about the fact that my section went very quickly!
I particularly enjoyed the question and answer section at the end, because I actually knew the answers to the questions and was able to participate more.

I really enjoyed some of the slides that the other groups had made for their presentations.
There were some with very nice colour schemes, and well thought out and entertaining animations. My favourite animation was on one of the slides where a bee flew into a flower to collect nectar.

I thought the other groups made a good effort on their presentations.

During the Christmas holiday our group will be writing our parts for our final wiki page.
We will re-group on the first week back to put it all togehter and edit it.
From our last page we found that our wrirint styles were very different, so the page we made, did not flow very well, and did not work as a whole.
We decided that we needed to look through it together and make sure parts get re-worded and re-structured.

Week 10

This week we watched the first lot of presentations from some of the groups.
Some presentations were rather long!
Our group decided that we have to make sure our presentation is within the time limit.

We set out to prepare our slides and speeches.

I was in charge of the results section. Which was very short, since there weren't a lot of results to report.

Thursday 10 December 2009

Week 9

This week there wasn't a lecture. We have been reading up on our group subject which is Decisions from experience.
At some point next Friday we will be putting all of our ideas together, making it into a powerpoint presentation.

The paper we were reading for the power point presentation was 'Decisions From Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice' by Hertwig et al. (2004). This paper was rather short. They conducted a study at a university in Israel, presenting students with six decision problems. For example problem 1 was a choice between an 80% chance of getting $4 or $3 for certain. Half of the participants were put in to the experience group where they were allowed to make decisions from their experience, which meant they were able to see the problems described on the computer screen. The other half were in the experience group, they only saw two buttons on the computer screen and were told that each button was associated with a payoff distribution.
Hertwig et al. found that more participants in the description group chose the option with the higher expected value (H) compared with the experience group.

Thursday 3 December 2009

Week 8: Review Session

What a frantic week!
This week our group coursework was due in, so final additions were being made to our page frantically. It was easier to edit and put all of our notes together for this page this Friday because we were all together in one room. Which made writing the page easier, as we could shout across to each other what we plan to do to the page, and what needed writing.
Doing the page separately at home, was not very easy as no-one knew what we should do, or could do, as we were all undecided until we met up to work as a group.

In the lesson, David breifly went over all of the topics we covered, reminding us of what we have learnt so far. It was a very quick lesson. But useful, for revision, as I forgot about some of the topics we discussed at the start of the module.

The weeks have flown by so fast, it is almost the end of the module, already!

Over the coming next few weeks we will be working as a group on our next assignment.
Our topic is; Decisions from experience. It sounds like an interesting enough topic.
We will see how it goes!

Thursday 26 November 2009

Week 7

This week we didn't have a lecture, and I was ill.
Although we corresponded by email about our first group coursework.
This week consisted of reading all of the papers given to us on the topic Judgement and Decisions: the Fast and Frugal way.
The three papers we looked at were:
Dhami, M.K. (2003). Psychological models of professional decision making. Psychological Science, 14 (2), p.174-180.
Dhami, M.K., & Ayton, P. (2001). Bailing and Jailing The Fast and Frugal Way. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 14, p.141-168.
Gigerenzer, G. & Goldstein, D.G. (1996). Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality. Psychological Review, 103 (4). p.650-669.

We found this topic the most interesting so far in the first few weeks of this module, and thought it was a good idea to choose it for our first group coursework.

It will be interesting to see how the essay turns out with all of our different writing style combined into one. It may not flow very well as a whole.

Week 6: Preference and choice

This week our group had to look at 'The experimental tests of the endowment effect and the coase theorem by Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler (1990).
This study had a lot of studies to look at and test the endowment effect.
In simple terms, the endowment effect is, for example; when people overprice items that they are trying to sell.

Kahneman found that in most of the studies the endowment effect persisted. No matter what the item was and how long they had owned it for, they still put a higher value on the item, than buyers thought it was worth.

I found this paper quite hard to get to grips with, as it had a lot to do with economics, and a lot of studies!
However, listening to the other groups do the presentation on this paper was helpful, as I understood a lot more from listening to them explain the paper and some of the studies.
I am now understanding why having groups presnting might be useful to us, as it is an extra way of learning and understanding the papers we are having to read, because if we were to just go off and read the papers without hearing feedback form others on what they got from the paper, we might be stuck with only the information we received from reading the paper, which can be limited if the paper was not fully understood.