Résumé de section

    • Description

      Decision-making under uncertainty is inherently interdisciplinary — no single lens (economics, psychology, or neuroscience) is sufficient on its own, and this course is structured to prove that claim repeatedly rather than just assert it once.



      Learning Objectives:

      • Explain why decision-making under uncertainty requires economic, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives together, not separately.

      • Preview each week's topic through a running example (an investment decision) that gets reanalyzed at each stage of the semester.

      • Distinguish, at an intuitive/informal level, risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty as everyday terms.

      • Introduce the population-vs-individual theme explicitly (the "height analogy") as a thread that resurfaces most weeks.

      • Course logistics: structure, assessment, self-study format, expectations.

    • In-Class Activity (90 mins)

    • Week 1 - Slides Fichier
      Déposé le 15 sept. 26, 13:54

    • Self-Study (2-4 hours per week)

    • Mandatory Reading Fichier

      Meder, B., Le Lec, F. and Osman, M., 2013. Decision making in uncertain times: what can cognitive and decision sciences say about or learn from economic crises?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(6), pp.257-260.

      Comments and Guiding Questions:

      1. Reading Guide: Read the abstract twice. Then carefully read Box 1 and Figure 1. Finally, read the entire paper and answer the guiding questions below..
      2. According to Knight's distinction as the paper presents it, what exactly separates "risk" from "uncertainty"?
      3. Using the paper's three sources of uncertainty (Figure 1A: Actor, Others, World), identify at least one source in each category for the investment decision from lecture (the friend's tip company, slide 4).
      4. The Lecture slides introduce 5 levels of uncertainty (slide 29) and Types of uncertainty (slide 30). Where do the paper (Figure 1) and the lecture slides agree? Where do they differ?
      5. The paper argues that lottery-style lab tasks limit what we can learn about real decisions like the eurozone bond example. Why, according to the authors?
      6. The paper does not present primary empirical results. Instead it diagnoses a conceptual problem and proposes a research direction. What is that problem? How could future research address it?
      7. We will post possible answers during next week for you to compare your work.

      NB: no submission required. This is to guide your personal work, and might be useful to take your own work.

      Déposé le 15 sept. 26, 14:54

    • Optional: Feed Your Curiosity

    • Optional Reading Fichier

      Spitz, Roger, and Olivier Desbiey. "The future of risk and insurability in the era of systemic disruption, unpredictability and artificial intelligence." Journal of Operational Risk (2025).

      Déposé le 15 sept. 26, 13:45