Fellows Vitalie Spinu and Peter Wakker win prestigious paper award
Research fellows Peter Wakker and Vitalie Spinu have been awarded the Decision Analysis Society Publication Award 2016 for the best paper published in the field of operations research in 2014. The paper has been selected in accordance with the following criteria: significance, relevance, originality, and readability. Read the paper here: ‘Average Utility Maximization: A Preference Foundation’.
The award will be presented at the Decision Analysis Society’s Awards Session at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 14, 2016. The winners are invited to present their paper in that session.
Authors
Peter Wakker is world renowned and therefore an important figurehead of Erasmus School of Economics. Professor Wakker has written almost 150 articles and is among the most cited economists in the world. What is particularly interesting is that his work moves into various disciplines, such as economics, mathematics, psychology, management and medicine. Peter Wakker has received a wide range of prestigious distinctions, such as the Ramsey Award, the Medical Decision Making Career Achievement Award and more recently (May 2016), Peter Wakker received an honorary doctorate from the University St. Gallen for his contributions to the field of behavioral economics.
Vitalie Spinu is a part-time Assistant Professor in Behavioral Economics at Erasmus School of Economics. He is working on modelling human behavior under risk and uncertainty in the context of behavioral finance. He is also a freelance data scientist and has developed and deployed models in a variety of domains such as fraud detection, churn prediction, audio diarization, recommender systems, behavioural search engines and semantic document clustering.
Amit Kothiyal is a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
DAS Publication Award
The Decision Analysis Society Publication Award is given annually to the best decision analysis journal article or book published in the second preceding calendar year, as judged by an award committee. For example, publications appearing in the year 2013 would be eligible for consideration in the year 2015.
For this award, decision analysis is defined as a prescriptive approach to provide insight for decision making based on axioms that are logically consistent with the axioms of von Neumann and Morgenstern and of Savage. Key constructs of decision analysis are utility to quantify one’s risk preferences and probability to quantify the state of one’s knowledge.
The intent of the award is to recognize the best publication in decision analysis. Contributions could include, but are not limited to, theoretical, methodological, and procedural contributions to decision analysis, descriptions of applications and experimental studies. Publications addressing behavioral aspects of decision making are eligible if the relevance to the theory or practice of prescriptive decision analysis is clear. Nominated publications will be judged for significance, relevance, originality, and readability. The award includes an honorarium of $750 and a plaque.
Citation: Amit Kothiyal, Vitalie Spinu, and Peter P. Wakker, ‘Average Utility Maximization: A Preference Foundation’, Vol 62, No 1 (2014), pp. 207-218, Operations Research.