Decision Under Risk

Westall, R. Sword of Damocles (1812)

Expertise is a key determining factor in design and technical decision-making. Leading theories of decision-making, and especially decision under risk, assume that choices are based on precise quantitative processing of tradeoffs. In fact, decisions made by technical experts are frequently based on qualitative “gist” processing – a highly-informed, yet simplified, representation of complex decision scenarios that captures their essential meaning in context. Most leading computational theories of decision-making do not have mechanisms to account for the incorporation of expertise, cultural, or interpretive factors. Therefore, they are of limited utility to scholars and practitioners who wish to use the output of computational analysis products to inform design decisions in a manner that is consistent with gist-based expertise. We developed the first mathematical formalization of Fuzzy-Trace Theory – a leading account of decision under risk and decision by experts – to take this qualitative processing into account, enabling explanation of several classical and novel experimental results, and building towards the explicit incorporation of models of expert decision-making that may be used to inform the design of decision support systems for technical fields. Specifically, I conducted a systematic review of core phenomena of risky decision-making, and successfully predicted 82 of 88 (93%) studies in the literature. I have built upon this body of work to apply this theory to the critical problem of combating antibiotic resistance – using FTT to explain decision-making by patients and expert healthcare providers with direct implications for educational interventions to reduce antibiotic resistance. Ongoing work is focused on extending these theories to inform decision-making by the intelligence community and expert engineers.

Research on this project is supported in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01GM114771, and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Data-Driven Discovery of Models (D3M) program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or DARPA.

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David A. Broniatowski
Associate Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

My research interests include social media data analytics, engineering system architecture, decision under risk, and online misinformation.

Posts

Our research was selected by INCOSE to be among the best from those published in Systems Engineering in 2018.

Publications

We propose, and test, a model of online media platform users’ decisions to act on, and share, received information. Specifically, …

Intelligence community experts face challenges communicating the results of analysis products to policy makers. Given the high-stakes …

Fuzzy-trace theory assumes that decision-makers process qualitative “gist” representations and quantitative “verbatim” representations …

In this study, we aim to address two overarching questions: 1) How do expert engineers perceive risks associated with their design …

Technical committees for industry consensus standards involve multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders are experts who assess and …

The computational study of narrative is important to multiple academic disciplines. However, prior research has been limited by the …

Fuzzy-trace theory assumes that decision-makers process qualitative “gist” representations and quantitative “verbatim” representations …

The computational study of narrative is important to multiple academic disciplines. However, prior research has been limited by the …

Decision-making for system design in the context of high-impact low probability events is challenging because individual cognitive …

We propose a new model of risk preferences that integrates theoretical principles relevant to mental representation, metacognitive …

Eberhardt Rechtin identified four approaches to system design that have come to define the field of systems architecture. Concurrently, …

Background. Extensive use of unnecessary antibiotics has driven the emergence of resistant bacterial strains, posing a threat to public …

In this paper, we develop a novel formalization of Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT), a leading theory of qualitative risky decision-making. Our …

Most leading computational theories of decision-making under risk do not have mechanisms to account for the incorporation of cultural …

A major concern regarding the study of narratives regards how they are indexed and retrieved. This is a question which touches on the …

Mutual misunderstanding between decision-makers in the political and technical environment leads to programs that experience cost …

Talks

Poster Presentation at the Society for Judgment and Decision Making Annual Meeting

Conference Presentation at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society

Poster Presentation at the APHA 2019 Annual Meeting and Expo

Deniz Marti gave a presentation at the OBSSR Methodology Seminar at NIH.

Communicating Meaning in the Intelligence Enterprise