Dr Barbara Fasolo

Luc Schneider

Dr Umar Taj

This course is compulsory on the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science. This course is not available as an outside option to students on other programmes.

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 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 Summer break.

Every afternoon (seminars and groupwork Monday-Thursday), you will work with your group on a new step of the Decision Canvas™, to apply the learnings from the course to a decision problem that one of your group members is currently facing. You will receive ongoing feedback and support from all members of the teaching team to ensure that you are implementing the tools you’re learning about correctly.

• Bazerman, M. (2017) Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. New York: Wiley. 8th edition;
• Fasolo, B., Heard, C. & Scopelliti, I. (2024) Mitigating Cognitive Bias To Improve Organizational Decisions: An Integrative Review, Framework, And Research Agenda. Journal of Management.
• 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).

Report (50%, 2000 words) in December.