Travelled to Toronto to present at Behavioural Decision-making conference

BDRM2In June I travelled to Toronto – my birthplace! – to participate in the 2016 Behavioral Decision Research in Management (#BDRM2016) conference. I really enjoyed the conference, which was bookended with an opening keynote by Ernst Fehr and a closing keynote by Elke Weber. The final conference dinner was held atop the amazing CN Tower with great views of the city.

I was fortunate enough to present a talk called “Probability-Based Loyalty Programs Increase Engagement”, which is co-authored with Prof. Liyin Jin (Fudan University) and Prof. Ying Zhang (Peking University). In the talk I describe how loyalty reward programs can be made more effective by adding a probability reward element. You can review the presentation slides here.

There were some great talks during the conference, some of the highlights for me were:

  • Luxi Shen showed that people can either like or dislike uncertainty depending on whether they are in a “hot” decision mode (e.g., a game) or “cold” decision mode (e.g., reviewing a likelihood report).
  • Eric Johnson on creating effective and selective nudges using carefully ordered checklists, which provides promise for smart architecture.
  • Dave Hardisty on encouraging pro-environmental choices by presenting on the label the energy running cost of the product over 10 years.
  • Neil Brigden on what he called the “slow sinkers” effect, which show that investor inaction is much more likely with less steep stock declines because of greater optimism and inaction inertia.