Judgment and Decision-Making

Organizations make hundreds of decisions each day. To improve decision quality, organizations store and analyze vast amounts of data. Nevertheless, many executives say their data analytics initiatives produce disappointing results. It doesn’t have to be this way. Data alone is no guarantee for making successful decisions.

The objectives of the course are the following:

• To provide an overview of important biases in decision-making, judgment, and explanations of such biases.
• To explain how experimental methods, combined with theory, can reveal how decisions get made
• To improve your decision-making by understanding biases and how they could

This module will introduce the psychology of human judgment and decision-making. We will focus on understanding when and why decision-makers in markets and firms make rational or irrational decisions. The emphasis is on the underlying psychological processes and their consequences. The emphasis is on the underlying psychological processes and their consequences. For example, we will study questions such as these:

• Why do people have inconsistent and shifting preferences?
• What are the implications for your business?
• Why do forecasts often fail?
• When do intuitive predictions work and when does it lead to poor judgment?
• How can decision processes be manipulated or improved?

Upon completion of the program, receive a certificate to add to your CV and LinkedIn profile.

Faculty

Ivo Vlaev joined Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, as a professor of Behavioural Science in 2014. Professor Vlaev received his doctorate (D.Phil.) in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford. He was formerly a Research Fellow at University College London and a Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences at Imperial College London. He has a track record of research in cognitive science and behavioural economics, which is published in peer-reviewed academic journals, book chapters and government reports.