Spring 2024 Computer Science 458 Introduction. 1/29/2024

Image of the Day

Economic decision theory is prone to the above error.

Today's Questions

(quiz 118)

Question 1. You are given a choice: (a) get $900 for certain, or (b) 90% chance to win $1,000 and 10% chance for nothing. What do you choose?
Question 2. You are given a choice: (a) lose $900 for certain, or (b) 90% chance to lose $1,000 and 10% chance of losing nothing. What do you choose?
Question 3. Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations...The respondents are asked to rank in order of likelihood various scenarios: Linda is (1) an elementary school teacher, (2) active in the feminist movement, (3) a bank teller, (4) an insurance salesperson, or (5) a bank teller also active in the feminist movement.
Question 4. An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with very little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
Question 5. Participants were asked to choose between two treatments for 600 people affected by a deadly disease. Treatment A was predicted to result in 400 deaths, whereas treatment B had a 33% chance that no one would die but a 66% chance that everyone would die. This choice was then presented to participants either with positive framing, i.e. how many people would live, or with negative framing, i.e. how many people would die.
Choice one: Either saves 200 lives, or a 33% chance of saving all 600 people, 66% possibility of saving no one.
Choice two: 400 people will die or a 33% chance that no people will die, and 66% probability that all 600 will die.
Question 6.
Write down the last 2 digits of your Social Security number. Now consider whether you would pay this number of dollars for items whose value you do not know, such as wine, chocolate and computer equipment. Finally, how much are you willing to pay? (Enter two numbers)
https://pollev.com/slade This is a survey that contains all of the above questions.

Canvas Quiz of the Day (need daily password)

Most days, there will be a simple canvas quiz related to the lecture. You need a password to activate the quiz, which I will provide in class. These quizzes will count toward your class participation grade. The quiz is available only during class.

Click for today's quiz.

Also, you will earn class participation points for posting to Discussions (not Ed Discussions.)

Administrivia

I have office hours Mondays and Wednesdays from 2-3 pm, on zoom, id 459 434 2854.

Complete the online student information sheet. Note: the previous form was not working. Please submit again. Thanks.

Yale Information Society Project Free lunch.

Tuesday January 30th, 12:10pm SLB 128
Encoding Poverty: The Algorithms Too Few People Talk About
Amos Toh, Senior Researcher, Human Rights Watch

Thursday February 1st, Noon, Baker Hall 405
Big Tech Feminism
Brenda Dvoskin, Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgetown University Law Center
Thomas Kadri, Assistant Professor, University of Georgia School of Law

Guest lecture next Monday, February 5th: John Niccolai,

Dr. John Niccolai is Chief Operating Officer of Global Fixed Income at Citadel.
John joined Citadel in 2008 as a Quantitative Researcher and was then appointed Head of Quantitative Research for Global Fixed Income from 2011- June 2018. He was subsequently named Head of Portfolio Construction for Global Fixed Income before assuming his current role in May 2019.
Prior to joining Citadel, he was a Vice President at JPMorgan Chase, where he was a member of the bank’s Proprietary Positioning Business. John previously worked as a Quantitative Modeler for interest rates in the Global Modeling and Analytics Group at Credit Suisse.
John received a bachelor’s degree from Caltech and a master’s degree and PhD from Columbia University.

We will go out to dinner afterwards at Villa Lulu, 230 College Street. We will have an in-person lottery in class on Wednesday to select students coming to dinner. Attendence for guest speakers is mandatory.

Assignments

You can begin work on hw 1

As mentioned in the Ed Discussion message, you need to access online stock information to rate a given stock as a buy or a sell. Yahoo Finance has a boatload of data. The yahoofinance python api stopped working last year. We used the yahooquery api instead. This year, the yahooquery api seems DOA. I welcome any suggestions for either getting these to run or other (free) sources of data.

Lecture

For the next class and the coming weeks: Give an example of an explanation you thought interesting because it was especially good or bad. It can be personal or from the news. Use the Discussions section of canvas (not Ed Discussion). You earn a quiz point by posting to Discussions.

What is a correct decision? See A Realistic Model of Rationality. This short paper provides a high-level introduction to the topics we will discuss in this course: goals, plans, resources, relationships, goal adoption, explanations, subjective decisions, emotions, advice, and persuasion. We contrast it with the standard economic decision theory. We want to develop a theory that can be implemented in a computer program.

Economic Decision Theory

God and the lottery ticket story.

Tic-tac-toe playing chicken, Calvin Trillin. (Inspired by last week's tic-tac-toe example.)

Behavioral Economics

PIMCO Behavioral Finance

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