MG406E      Half Unit
Behavioural Decision Science

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This course introduces students to Behavioural Decision Science: the science that explains and predicts how humans make decisions (the decision ‘process’) and how well (the decision ‘outcome’). The course will focus on the process, and unveil the subtle and sometimes unconscious influences played by our mind (biases) and the context in which decisions are faced: What has been chosen in the past? Is there positive or negative affect - perhaps because of risk and uncertainty? Can AI be involved? All of these (and more) are factors that often determine how information is searched before choosing, how decisions are made, and the quality of the decision made.

In this course, you will be guided to the scientific language of decisions, judgments and biases. Each day you will work as a group and apply the steps of our proprietary tool ‘Decision Canvas’ to improve a real decision that you will select, applying different bias-mitigating interventions – from ‘process nudges’ to ‘debiasing’ and ‘choice architecture.

The course is entirely seminar-based and balances theory, evidence and experience. It involves group-work throughout the course. We will alternate teaching with interactive activities designed to observe and feel the process of decision making from the ‘inside’, before reviewing behavioural decision theories and evidence from lab and field studies.

The assessment is designed to give students the opportunity to work as a group and apply their new skills to support a real decision, as well as produce, individually, a rigorous and scholarly report on a specific aspect of decision making.

8 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

The formative assignment will take place on the final day of the course after all the lectures and seminars have been completed. The assignment will consist of a plenary presentation in which students divided into small groups will be asked to give a short presentation discussing an intervention that can be used to tackle the most important biases in a decision making problem of their choice. Student groups will develop their plenary presentations during seminars while interacting with the course teachers and other students. The formative feedback will be given at a team level, and will focus on the rigour and use of behavioural science concepts learned in the course.

• Bazerman, M. (2017) Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. New York: Wiley. 8th edition;
• Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane;
• Krpan, D., Fasolo, B., & Schneider, L. (2025). A call for precision in the study of behaviour and decision. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-4.
• Larrick, R.P. (2004). Debiasing (Chapter 16). In D.J. Koehler, & N. Harvey, Blackwell Handbook of Judgement and Decision Making. Malden: Blackwell Publishing
• Russo, J. E. & Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2002) Winning decisions: How to make the right decision the first time, Piatkus Publ. Limited.

Presentation (20%) in September

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

Report (30%, 1000 words)

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

Report (50%, 2000 words) in December

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

• 20% in-class team presentation

• 30% individual report on the groupwork

• 50% Bias Analysis and Mitigation report

A report on a unique offline case that the students will have constructed during the week