GUEST EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: Giving Mathematical Psychology Away: Challenges and Promises

Abstract

The four articles in this Special Issue on Practical Implications of Basic Research on Uncertainty and Utility were solicited in an attempt to meet two goals. The first goal was to get active researches in this field to think about the lessons that recent theoretical and empirical advances in basic research on utility theory might hold for practitioners, i.e., for those who use utility theory to facilitate better decision making in a broad range of applications. Many recent results in behavioral decision theory are not widely known to potential users of such information, because they are reported in a language and manner not readily accessible to practitioners and published in journals that are neither directed and nor read by them. A recent article (Cohen, 1996) on the normative status of expected utility (EU) theory in Medical Decision Making, for example, discussed the defensibility of violations of EU's independence axiom without any reference to the crucial distinction between violations of independence (or monotonicity) per se and violations of common probability accounting equivalences (see Luce, 1990). Some results may seem unimportant from a theoretical perspective to basic researchers, but may have important methodological implications and may raise the level of applications of utility theory significantly, if they were more widely known. The hope was that basic researchers would discuss their work from a fruitfully different perspective if challenged to consider its implications for decision making under uncertainty in areas such as risk analysis, strategic planning, and policy making, or its contributions to address problems in fields such as medicine or finance. They were asked to consider how recent research could improve or change the tools currently used to aid judgments or decisions in applied settings. The second goals was to make decision researchers more aware of unsolved problems that are important to practitioners. Practitioners researchers with content-specific interests were asked to describe pressing assessment or implementation problems in their field and to suggest basic research questions to which they would most like to see answers. In short, the Special Issue was conceived as a step toward narrowing the gap between the producers and potential users of new insights about decision making under risk and uncertainty. Article ID jmps.1999.1255, available online at http: www.idealibrary.com on