Technion Prediction Tournament

How good a modeler are you?

The Technion Prediction Tournament seeks to find out ...

"Motivation and the basic idea

Classical behavioral decision research focuses on counter-examples to rational decision theory (like the Allais’ paradox), and simple models of sufficient conditions to these counter-examples (like original prospect theory, Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). We believe that this focus was highly effective in establishing the importance of behavioral decision research; yet, the future of our discipline depends on our ability to advance beyond counter-examples (see Budescu et al., 1998.

The current set of competitions tries to take one step beyond counter-examples by focusing on well defined spaces of choice problems. The set includes three independent competitions that will focus on three distinct choice tasks:

One shot decisions under risk (like the situations studied by Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) - Condition Description

One shot decisions from experience (like the situations studied by Hertwig et al., 2004) - Condition E-sampling

Repeated decisions from experience (like the situations studied by Barron and Erev, 2003) - Condition E-repeated

We ran one set of experimental studies (the estimation set) and will soon run a second set (the competition set). Both sets focus on choice between two alternatives, a safe choice and a risky choice:

Safe: Medium with certainty;

Risk: Low with probability p; High otherwise"