Biography

Shawn Curley is a Professor in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.  He earned his master's degree in Mathematics and his doctoral degree in Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  His research has been published in the leading decision and management journals, including Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.  His research has also appeared in conference proceedings and invited book chapters.  He is active in the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and has received the John Castellan Service Award from that group.  He is currently serving on the editorial boards of the top decision journals:  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Background:  "My background in terms of training and interests combines mathematical/statistical theory and psychological theory.  This combination of interests began during my undergraduate years, leading to a degree that combined Mathematics and Psychology.  I then entered the Mathematical Psychology program at The University of Michigan, the leading university in that area of study at that time.  It was there that I became specifically interested in decision making and in applied decision making.  In addition to business and consumer applications, patient and physician decision making have also been an interest as an applied area.  Mathematical and statistical models play multiple roles in the study of the psychology of decision making.  In my own work, they come into play in the development of normative standards of behavior (How should decisions best be made?) and in the formation of descriptive models of behavior (How do individuals decide?).  Since at Minnesota, my research has grown to include the role and effects of technology upon decision making, shaping my current interests."

Research Interests:  "My research is in the area of behavioral decision theory.  Generally, how do people make decisions?  And, how can we improve decision making?  More specifically, I am interested in the role and judgment of uncertainty in decisions.  Variation is the very nature of reality, and making decisions in the face of variation is necessarily an uncertain endeavor.  How do we act in the face of that uncertainty?  How do we represent uncertainty?  Two additional, general components drive my current research.  First is pursuing the implications of framing judgment and decision making in terms of making and evaluating arguments.  This is in contrast to a more traditional computationally-oriented view of decision making in terms of a cost/benefit or utility framework.  Second is a developing stream in my current research of investigating the connection between technology and decision making.  Specific instances include studying the impact of decision aids on bidding behavior in certain types of auctions and studying the reasoning behind individuals' reactions and behaviors in the realm of software piracy."

 Current Research Projects:  Include the following:

Group Decision Making and Project Teams.  In managing the decisions made in an organization, managers often rely on project teams in order to capitalize on the broader knowledge that group decision making offers.  The manager creating a project team is faced with the recurring problem of selecting from a large pool of potential candidates.  One of the important goals is to select individuals with the requisite knowledge, necessitating that the manager infer the levels of the candidates’ expertise.  Conversely, from the viewpoint of the employees who learn about new projects, they need to signal their expertise as appropriate to the manager responsible for the selection.  From both perspectives, individuals need to be able to recognize, understand, and apply cues for identifying expertise.  What cues do managers believe to be useful for judging and signaling expertise?  Which cues are judged as the most important?  These are the questions addressed in this research project.

Ethical Decision Making and Software Piracy.  This project is directed at understanding ethical decision making, particularly within the domain of software piracy.  In so doing, the goal is to contribute to the understanding of how consumers view software piracy, how ethical decisions are made, and to expand our theories of decision making more generally.  Factors that differentiate software from other types of product are identified and tested.

Modeling User Acceptance of Personalization Technologies.  Familiar examples of these technologies are present on numerous consumer websites, for example, the various recommendation options available at Amazon.com.  The question is:  What influences whether and to what extent individuals use these technologies?  A theoretical framework similar to receiver operating characteristic (ROC) theory is developed and its implications for understanding user acceptance are elaborated.

Bidding Behavior in Combinatorial Auctions.  This project studies empirically the impact of providing real-time bidder support in combinatorial auctions.  A combinatorial auction is one in which bidders are allowed to bid on combinations of items in a multi-item auction, e.g., placing a bid of $5 on the set of two items {A, B} available for auction.  Such auctions have potential advantages when items are interdependent; however, only recently have researchers developed the ability to analyze features of such auctions in real-time, e.g., by providing currently winning bid combinations and, as a result, helping bidders in constructing new bids.  The effects of providing such feedback are the focus of this research.

General Impressions:  "The research-oriented camaraderie within the department, and among the faculty and doctoral students, is probably the most noteworthy aspect of the Information and Decision Sciences environment.  It is one that visitors all seem to recognize and is even more obvious to those of us here."

For contact information, please visit the IDSc Faculty Information Page.