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Professor Mike Shor participates in Science Salon on Climate Change

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Last Thursday, eighty Hartford-area residents met at NIXS in Hartford for cocktails and a discussion of climate change, part of UConn’s ongoing Science Salon series.

Professor Shor discussed his latest research about how people process (and ignore) scientific evidence in favor of preconceived notions. One audience member (failing to appreciate the irony) told the entire panel of scientists that he does not believe a word of what they are saying but their “so called facts” conflict with his prior view.

Background:

For the first Science Salon (including Dick Langlois): http://econ.uconn.edu/2015/06/08/professor-langlois-at-uconns-first-science-salon/

Professors Alpert and Shor Present an Early College Experience Workshop

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On October 30 Professors WiECE Workshop presented by Professors William Alpert and Mikhael Shor lliam Alpert and Mikhael Shor presented a workshop to 20 members of the Early College Experience faculty.

Early College Experience (ECE) is an opportunity for students to take UConn courses while still in high school. Every UConn ECE course is equivalent to the same course at the University of Connecticut. There are approximately fifty courses in over twenty disciplines made available to partner high schools. Courses are taught on the high school campus by high school instructors who have been certified as adjunct faculty members by the University of Connecticut.

The Economics Department now offers Connecticut High School students three introductory economics classes at almost 30 high schools throughout the state. The workshop highlighted Professor Shor introducing the teachers to current thinking about behavioral economics and included discussions of best practices of integrating the political landscape into economic study, the economics of migration and immigration, the distributions of income and wealth, and current thinking about macroeconomics and money.

During the last decade ECE has grown to over 11,000 FTE students and from 2 economics instructors to 25. Professor Alpert is the ECE Economics Department Coordinator.

Professor Shor publishes in Operations Research Letters

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505567Professor Mikhael Shor has had his paper, “How collaborative forecasting can reduce forecast accuracy,” accepted by Operations Research Letters.

The brief article compares an independent supplier and retailer who each forecast consumer demand with a jointly-profit-maximizing supplier and retailer who share their forecasts of consumer demand. The move from non-collaborative to collaborative forecasting can have the unexpected impact of decreasing demand forecast accuracy while still increasing profit. Therefore, collaborating firms should maintain a focus on profits, not forecast accuracy, as the appropriate measure of success.

Sining Wang at IFREE

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IFREE-logoAs other graduate students battle the winter snow, PhD student Sining Wang will be spending a week in January in Southern California. Sining has been selected to participate in IFREE’s Twentieth Annual Visiting Graduate Student Workshop in Experimental Economics. IFREE is the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics and was established in 1997 by Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering research bringing experimental methods to economics. The workshop will be held at Chapman University, Vernon Smith’s academic home. In the week-long session, Sining will participate in experiments, learn about experimental results and techniques, and have a chance to present his own research to leading faculty in experimental economics.

Prof. Shor publishes in Review of Economics and Statistics

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Professor Mike Shor has had his paper, “Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices,” accepted for publication by the Review of Economics and Statistics. The paper is coauthored with Tibor Besedeš, Cary Deck, and Sudipta Sarangi, co-PIs on Professor Shor’s NIH grant that supported the research.

Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A specific tournament-style architecture achieves this goal. An alternate architecture in which subjects compare each subset of options to the most preferred option encountered thus far fails to improve performance due to the status quo bias. Subject preferences over different choice architectures are negatively correlated with performance, suggesting that providing choice over architectures might reduce the quality of decisions.

Prof. Mike Shor Granted Tenure

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t_shorThe Board of Trustees has promoted Prof. Mike Shor to tenured Associated Professor of Economics.

Professor Shor’s research to date has focused on industrial organization and experimental investigations of decision-making. His work has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Theory, Health Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, as well as journals in marketing, accounting, and psychology.

In addition to research, Prof. Shor has been teaching game theory and behavioral economics at both the undergraduate and PhD levels at UConn.

Professor Mike Shor Co-Authors Textbook

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managerialeconomicsManagerial Economics, a textbook co-authored by Professor Mike Shor, was released Monday for sale. The text is a succinct introductory economics textbook targeted primarily at graduate business students.

The book covers traditional material using a problem-based pedagogy built around common business mistakes. Models are used sparingly, and then only to the extent that they help students figure out why mistakes are made, and how to fix them. This edition’s succinct, fast-paced presentation and challenging, interactive applications place students in the role of a decision maker who has to not only identify profitable decisions, but also implement them. The lively book provides an excellent ongoing reference for students pursuing business careers.

Grad students who have had Professor Shor for core Micro Theory may be surprised by the shortage of equations.

Click here to purchase the text from Amazon.

Professor Shor Named Associate Editor of Economic Inquiry

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Economic InquiryEconomic Inquiry, a general interest journal, has named Professor Mike Shor as Associate Editor. Published since 1962, Economic Inquiry is widely regarded as one of the top scholarly journals in its field.

Economic Inquiry has taken steps in recent years to diversify its areas of specialization. Professor Shor will primarily be assisting in the newly developed area of Competition Economics.

Professor Shor publishes results of NIH-funded research

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Professor Mike ShorProfessor Mike Shor, PI on an NIH grant examining choice overload, has had the results of his research published by two economics journals. Along with his co-investigators (Tibor Besedes, Cary Deck, and Sudipta Sarangi), Professor Shor finds that people faced with too many choices often have difficulty discerning the right choice, contrary to classic economic theory. Seniors are especially vulnerable to poor decision-making when facing a multitude of options, such as critical decisions relating to health care. The main results are forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics. An examination of why seniors, specifically, make poor decisions appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. The authors find that poor performance among seniors is not for lack of trying, but due to seniors’ use of sub-optimal decision rules to reduce the number of choices down to a manageable level.