There will be a meeting of the London Judgment & Decision Making group 
next Wednesday, May 31st, with a presentation by Dr Elke Weber of the 
Center for the Decision Sciences, University of Columbia. The title and 
abstract of the presentation are given below. 

LJDM meetings are held at 5pm on Wednesdays during term time, in room 313 
of the UCL Psychology Department on Bedford Way. All welcome. The 
Psychology Department building is on the corner of Bedford Way and Gordon 
Square, map (showing Bedford Way) below:

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?
x=529951&y=182185&z=1&sv=bedford+way&s
t=1&tl=Bedford+Way,+WC1&searchp=newsearch.srf&mapp=newmap.srf

- Matt Twyman & Nick Sevdalis

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Different Objectives of Agricultural Decisions in the Argentine Pampas: Do 
Farmers Maximize Expected Utility, Regret-Adjusted Expected Utility, or 
the Prospect Theory Value Function?  

Agricultural ecosystems play a central role in world food production and 
food security. Agroecosystems combine the complexity, multiplicity of 
scales, and feedbacks of biophysical interactions in natural ecosystems 
with the additional intricacies of human decision-making. Here we describe 
a project that aims to understand and model the dynamic interactions of 
natural and human components in agroecosystems. Emphasis is placed on (a) 
the impacts of interannual and inter-decadal climate variability and the 
use of climate information, and (b) agricultural decision-making in the 
light of climate variability, probabilistic climate information (e.g., 
seasonal forecasts or decadal projections), and other contextual factors 
(economic, social, technological). The geographic focus is the Argentine 
Pampas, a major agricultural area. 
 
Actual use of climate information in agricultural decisions and the 
production decisions themselves most likely deviate from frequently used 
prescriptions (e.g., maximization of expected utility, EU). In a set of 
simulations, we are exploring the effects of different objective functions 
on optimal farm management strategies both without and with the 
availability of seasonal climate forecasts. In addition to EU maximization 
(as a benchmark), we examine the maximization of EU corrected for 
anticipated regret, and the maximization of the expected value associated 
with prospect theory. Preliminary results show differences in optimal 
actions for the various objective functions and for different combinations 
of parameters. The result of our simulations can be compared with data on 
actual crop allocations made by farmers over the past several years and 
with results of decision experiments to identify the best-fitting 
objective function and its parameter values for each farmer. Output of our 
analyses of individual farm decision makers will be used as input into 
agent-based models of farm decision that allow us to test the effect of 
new information, technologies, or institutions on crop allocations in the 
region.