Faculty & Staff Notes Archives: Winter 2003

Week of January 27, 2003
Professors of economics Luis Fernandez and Bob Piron presented their paper "Can Prospect Theory Explain Preference Reversal?" at Ohio State and Case Western universities last fall. Preference reversal describes an anomaly in decision making under risk in which many experimental subjects declare that gamble A is preferable to gamble B, but also that they would buy or sell B at higher price than A. This phenomenon, discovered nearly 35 years ago, has never been satisfactorily explained, and it is important because it offers plausible evidence against the standard economic theory of risky choice, the expected utility hypothesis.

In their paper, Fernandez and Piron reported the results of an experiment they devised to test the predictive power of a hypothesis called prospect theory, a proposed explanation for preference reversal devised by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky. The experiment was conducted early in the fall semester. Their results are consistent with the observation made by Kahneman and Tversky that preference reversal could be the result of a failure of "procedure invariance," i.e., the particular procedure used to question subjects about their preferences actually alters those preferences. Since the pricing (declaring a buying or selling price) and ranking (choosing one over another in pair-wise choice situations) of gambles are two different "procedures", Fernandez and Piron concluded that subjects regarded these two procedures as non-equivalent, even though in fact they are logically equivalent. This confirms Kahneman and Tversky’s hypothesis.

Week of January 20, 2003
John Bucher, director of Oberlin's Center for Information Technology (CIT), recently received the Penny Crane Service Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (ACM SIGUCCS) and was named to the SIGUCCS Hall of Fame. The awards were presented at the annual SIGUCCS User Services Conference in November. In addition, Bucher is serving as the program chair for EDUCAUSE 2003, the premier higher education IT conference event.

Week of December 9, 2002
This past November, Robert Bosch, professor of mathematics, presented a paper titled "Constructing Domino Portraits" at the 2002 annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He also launched a website and small business, www.DominoArtwork.com, devoted to artwork constructed out of complete sets of dominoes. On December 15 he was interviewed by ZIP-FM, a radio station in Japan, about his artwork. One of his pieces, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe built out of 16 complete sets of double nine dominoes, hangs in the second floor of the King Building. Another piece---a 48-set portrait---has been commissioned by the local organizing committee of the 2003 International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, which will take place in Copenhagen in August 2003.

Warren Darcy, professor of music theory, has been invited to serve as a faculty member at the 2004 Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. The Mannes Institute is a privately supported musical think tank that offers distinguished music scholars around the world a unique opportunity to gather outside of the conventional conference format in a relaxed setting in New York City and learn from each other in a sustained, collegial, and interactive way. .An intensive series of high-level participatory workshops, plenary sessions, and roundtable discussions focuses on a different topic each year under the guidance of a rotating faculty of experts drawn from the international music community. Darcy and James Hepokoski (Yale University) will offer workshops in Sonata Theory, a genre-based method of analyzing sonatas that they have developed over the past decade; their book on Sonata Theory is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.