Aysegul Engin visited ASA, IIASA

Abstract

As recent emergent research field, behavioral operational research (BOR) draws academics attention once more to the significance of behavioral and psychological aspects of operational research (OR) practice. Current project focuses on the psychological aspects in individual decision maker support, when information is transmitted through an interface followed by an immediate decision. Each paper focuses on different aspects of the transmitted information in the case of the electronic bidding
platforms. The main aim is to identify the core mechanisms that are preventing decision
makers to achieve their desired goals because of various psychological phenomena (i.e. ego depletion, cognitive overload...). The first paper focuses on individual decision making under different information representation conditions and underlines the importance of the decision makers' individual differences with respect to cognitive styles and ego depletion In the design of auction platforms the information that a bidder receives can be depicted in various forms. The choice of representation format is generally taken by the platform designer. However, this paper shows that a design choice that does not take platform user into account can have negative consequences for the platform users. Since electronic reverse auctions are facilitated through computerized channels, it is easily possible to calculate information about the market and transmit it to the auction participants as the auction takes place. The second paper concentrates on the question, from how much information about the market the auction users can benefit and whether personality traits influence how they react to different amounts of information about the market during the auction. The results show that decisions makers differ individually about how they use different levels of information when they are bidding. Therefore, the choice for the amount of information that is communicated to the platform user needs to be an educated design choice. The third paper deals with the question, how platform users behave in the presence of stochastic information. As procurement auctions include pricing decision for the future transactions, uncertainty about costs and market is a significant aspect to consider. Since humans are prone to biases when they are making decisions under uncertainty conditions, the paper investigates the individuals' proneness to overconfidence bias under uncertain feedback conditions, taking individual platform user differences into account.