The Southern Ontario Behavioural Decision Research Conference (SOBDR), is a one-day conference hosted by the Ivey Business School in collaboration with the Centre Building Sustainable Value Research Centre. This year’s theme, sustainable decision making, brings together researchers and academics who share a common interest in the study of human decision making. This year’s conference, the 12th annual event, will take place at Ivey on Friday May 6th, 2016.
The conference co-chairs of this event are as follows:
- Amos Nadler, Assistant Professor, Finance
- June Cotte, Scott & Melissa Beattie Professor in Marketing & Faculty Director of Research
- Neil Bendle, Assistant Professor of Marketing & David G. Burgoyne Faculty Fellow
- Romel Mostafa, Assistant Professor, Business, Economics and Public Policy
Last year’s event was hosted by the Rotman School of Management and was sponsored by BEworks Inc. The featured Keynote Speaker of last year’s event was David Pizarro, who is renowned for his work in understanding the relationship between emotions and decision making.
This year’s featured Keynote Speaker is Joe Avrai, the Max McGrw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise in the School of Natural Resources & Environment, and the Ross School of Business, at the University of Michigan. He is also the Director of the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. In addition to his position at the U of M, Joe is a Senior Researcher at the Decision Science Research Institute in Eugene, OR, and he is an Adjunct Professor in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Joe, being an internationally recognized expert in the risk and decision sciences, has two main areas of research; firstly focusing on how people process information and make decisions, with a specific emphasis on how people make tradeoffs, and secondly, focusing on developing and testing decision-aiding tools and approaches that can be used by people to improve decision quality across a wide range of environmental, social, and economic contexts.
In addition to Joe’s academic work, he is a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chartered Science Advisory Board, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Environmental Change and Society.