Dr Barbara Fasolo

Biography 

Barbara Fasolo is a behavioural decision researcher and Lecturer in Decision Sciences at the Department of Management’s Operational Research Group. Economist by training (BSc Bocconi University, Milan Italy, 1995), she then took a MSc in Decision Sciences from the LSE (1997) and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2002), under the supervision of Prof.Gary McClelland. Prior to joining the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2004,  she worked for two years as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition Group of the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the editorial review board for Journal of Economic Psychology, the European Association of Decision Making, the London Judgment and Decision Making Group,  and the Society of Judgment and Decision Making.

Research Interests

My work is in the area of 'behavioural decision making' - the empirical study of how people form preferences, make judgments and choices, on their own as well as with the tools of decision modelling. 

From a first interest in online consumer choice and online choice aids, my research broadened to explore individual choice behaviour across a range of domains characterized by some factor that makes choosing 'difficult' (e.g., choice conflict and negative interattribute correlations; too much information and choice -- in consumer choice, mate choice, surrogate choice). Exposure to London, the LSE, and colleagues with an expertise in decision analysis and operational research, has refined the aims of my behavioural work towards informing decision modelling, policy-making and managerial practice, besides that of advancing the scientific knowledge of the human ability to make decisions.

Keywords

Behavioural Decision Making; Decision Modelling; Consumer Decisions; Web-Based Choice; Tyranny of Choice; Decision Capability

Teaching 

I teach behavioural decision making topics in the context of undergraduate and post-graduate courses. Besides core principles of behavioural theories, my teaching covers 'practice-relevant' findings from behavioural empirical research - experiments, field studies, surveys.

I am course director of the MSc Decision Sciences.

Since 2005 I have taught a course on Judgment and Decision Making for Management at the LSE Summer School.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles: Representative Selection

Edwards, W. & Fasolo, B. (2001). Decision Technology. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 581-606.

Fasolo, B., McClelland, G.H. & Misuraca, R. (2003). Individual differences and adaptive choice. Research in Economics, 57 (3), 219-233.

Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., van den Broek, E., Fasolo, B., & Katsikopoulos, K. (2005)."A 30% chance of rain tomorrow." How does the public understand probabilistic weather forecasts? Risk Analysis, 25 (3), 623-629.

Fasolo, B., Misuraca, R., McClelland, G.H. & Cardaci, M. (2006) The attraction effect in electronic shopping environments. Psychology & Marketing, 23 (10), 799-811.

Katsikopoulos, K. V. & Fasolo, B. (2006). New tools for decision analysts. IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics – Part A, 36, 5, pp. 960-967.

Fasolo, B., McClelland, G,H, & Todd, P.M. (2007). Escaping the Tyranny of Choice: When fewer attributes make choice easier. Marketing Theory, 7 (1), 13-26.

Todd, P. M., Penke, L., Fasolo, B., & Lenton, A. P. (2007). Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 104(38), 15011-15016.

Morton, A. & Fasolo, B. (in press). Behavioural Decision Theory for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis: a guided tour. Journal of the Operational Research Society (available online from 9.1.08)

Books

R. Misuraca, B. Fasolo, & M. Cardaci (Eds) 'I processi decisionali: Paradossi, Sfide, Supporti'. Il Mulino: Bologna, Italy. (2007).

Contact Details

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