Newsletter

In the real-world, there are many examples that demonstrate a gap between how we should make decisions and how we actually make decisions. Some believe that humans are irrational, others believe we are emotional, and others that we have little cognitive capacity to deal with the complexity of the real-world. At the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory (DDMLab) we investigate how humans actually make decisions. We are particularly interested in investigations of how we make decisions in dynamic environments, and we aim at understanding and reducing this gap.

Dynamic environments are situations that involve change over time and while decisions are being made. Many characteristics of dynamic environments challenge our ability to make decisions including: interrelationships over time, feedback delays, workload, and exogenous events out of our control. A main conclusion from our work is that in dynamic environments people must rely on their own experience to make decisions. Thus, our main research focus is on how we develop such experience and how we use it to make decisions.

At the DDMLab, we seek to build models and methods that will help explain, predict, and draw recommendations for improving decision making in dynamic environments. We use multiple research methods, but notably, we rely on laboratory experiments where we collect human behavior using dynamic simulations (Decision Making Games) and on computational cognitive models developed on our theoretical framework (Instance-Based Learning Theory, IBLT) to understand and predict such behavior.

The DDMLab was founded in 2002 by Prof. Cleotilde Gonzalez. Initially supported by a grant from the Army Research Laboratories (Advanced Decisions Architectures, Collaborative Technology Alliance), the DDMLab is a group fully funded by grants from research institutions such as National Science Foundation, Army Research Labs, Army Research Office, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and others. The laboratory consists of post-doctoral fellows, research-programmers, doctoral students, and research assistants. Lab members come from different fields, including Behavioral Decision Research, Psychology, Engineering, and Computer Science.

Click on the menu to learn more about our research projects, methods, tools, publications and people, or contact us for more information. Click here to download a copy of our current brochure.

The Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory is part of the Social and Decision Sciences Department,  Carnegie Mellon University. For updates and comments, please email hauyuw@andrew.cmu.edu.