Michael Woodford & Jacqueline Gottlieb, Integrating Information Sampling and Decision Making through Large-Scale Testing of Human Information Seeking Behavior (2018 Awardees)
Article from Columbia Research
In a highly novel undertaking to account for variation in decision-making behavior, Michael Woodford, John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics, and Jacqueline Gottlieb, Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, have been collaborating to close this gap between the empirical and the theoretical: between how we think people choose and how they actually make complex choices. When asked why an interdisciplinary team is necessary for this project, the team explained: “In economics we consciously consider the tradeoffs of certain decisions. In neuroscience, the brain selectively – and unconsciously – filters information, which clues us into the cognitive mechanisms that construct certain perceptions of choice options. Taken together, neuroscience provides the mechanisms through which we make decisions that are relevant to economics. However, the fundamental disconnect between the empirical nature of neuroscience and theoretical nature of economics necessitates an interdisciplinary team to collaborate on the problem of decision-making.”
One of the problems traditionally hindering this unification is a lack of means to collect a sufficient amount of data on information sampling behavior. Once access to multivariate data is gained, it becomes an additional problem to determine how to analyze it. “Access to more information has created problems that were easy to ignore in the past. For example, people are now crossing the street with smartphones in hand and have to make split-second decisions on whether they should sample information from their phones or look at the street light. This is why we see so many people being hit by cars while staring at their phones – they’ve sampled information faultily. Because people now have access to so much information all at once, it is more important than ever to understand human decision-making processes.”
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