Decision Sciences (PhD) Program at a Glance

Highly competitive and globally interconnected markets, accelerated population aging throughout the world, rapid progress in information and gene technologies, the overuse of natural resources, emerging religious fundamentalism and new hot spots of military and social conflict highlight the persisting need for and dependency on accurate, forward looking and sustainable decisions in our contemporary world which will have critical consequences for future generations.

Decision sciences (DS) address this rising demand. Concerned with understanding and improving decision making of individuals, groups, and organizations DS integrate both basic and applied empirical research that is of enormous interest in almost all social science disciplines and in the practical world.

Research insights from the DS can improve managerial decision making (e.g., correcting common errors and biases in the assessment of risk), medical decisions (e.g., conveying costs & benefits of alternative treatment options to patients), organizational behavior (e.g., maximizing bargaining power), international political inter- vention (e.g., incorporating cultural and religious differences in peace and conflict situations), negotiation stra- tegies (e.g., identifying ‘focal’ solutions), marketing (e.g., understanding the effects of emotion and attention), or artificial intelligent systems (e.g., generating deliberate choices by autonomous machinery pursuing com- plex tasks in unstructured environments).

1 Selecting research area and advisor, forming PhD committee
2 Preferable at the beginning of the program
3 Students are encouraged attending conferences and must present their own research at one international conference
4 Student may teach parts of a lecture/seminar under the advisor’s supervision
5 Student may give at most four 75-min lectures/seminars without the advisor being present
6 The student is expected to complete the dissertation thesis during the 5th and 6th semester. Two non-rejected articles in international journals with the student as first author may be considered as equivalent.

Core Modules:

(A) Judgment and Individual Decision Making

This module will introduce normative and descriptive models of judgment and choice. Models will include the expected utility model and its variations, including a discussion on violations of the crucial axioms; random utility models; prospect theory; decision field theory; Bayesian models. The psychological approach to judgment and decision making will include heuristics and biases, support theory, adaptive decision making, ecological approaches, current models of human attention and cognitive control, models of affect and emotion as well as critical overviews over the most recent research in the above mentioned areas.

(B) Decision Making in Social Contexts

The aim of this module is to systematically analyze the impact of social, political, economic, and organizational environments on the processes and outcomes of individual and collective decision making. Building on inter-disciplinary findings, we look into success stories as well as into failures of decision making in markets, international institutions, firms, parliamentary parties, hospitals, religious groups or family networks. To learn about the structural premises and mechanics of social contexts on optimal decision making, teaching reflects most up-to date research from economics, political science, sociology, organizational science, and social psychology.

(C) Research Statistics and Methods

The program puts strong emphasis on excellent skills in experimental and social science methods and methodology.
The methods curriculum commences with a mandatory written and oral placement test in research methods of decision sciences, offered immediately before the first semester of doctoral training starts. Fellows who exhibit insufficient methods skills in the placement test will be required to attend remedial courses during their first two semesters. Such courses are offered, in English, for undergraduate students of all BA programs of Jacobs University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Methods faculty will participate regularly in the Proposal Workshop/Colloquium that every fellow has to attend during her/his first semester of doctoral training. Participation of methods faculty in this course introduces fellows to the methods expertise at Jacobs University, while at the same time providing methods faculty with an overview of the methods training necessities of the fellows.
The inclusion in the Proposal Workshop of methods faculty also aids the latter in determining the contents of the modularized Advanced Methods course offered to fellows in the second semester, and of the Tailored Methods Tutorials offered in the second and third semesters. The modularized Advanced Methods course will be structured in a way that 8 short modules (three course units each, presumably blocked to one or two days) will be offered by methods faculty. Such modules will focus on topics like "mathematical modeling" “advanced multivariate statistical analysis”, the “comparative case study approach”, “sampling and matching”, “strategies of triangulation in social research”, “small-n statistical procedures” and “discourse and document analysis”. From the offerings of the methods faculty every fellow selects 4 modules, which—together with an introductory phase in which all fellows participate—form the Advanced Methods course. In order to enhance fellows’ skills to engage in a mixed-methodology approach in their dissertation, fellows will be obliged to select—among the four modules of their course—at least one module from the quantitative and one from the qualitative methodological paradigm.

The Tailored Methods Tutorials in the second and third semesters are lab-like colloquia that come close to a one-to-one tutoring. A fellow’s methods supervisor will work on dissertation data with the fellow and let other fellows who follow a very similar methodological approach benefit at the same time.

Prof. Dr. Adele Diederich
Professor of Psychology (Program Coordinator)
(Dynamic stochastic models of individual decision making, decision making under time constraints and in conflict situations, random utility models)

Prof. Dr. Werner Bergholz
Professor of Electrical Engineering
(Fact based decision making within the framework of a Quality Management System)

Prof. Dr. Andreas Birk
Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
(Decision making in artificial intelligent systems)

Prof. Dr. Klaus Boehnke
Professor of Social Science Methodology
(Juvenile political delinquency, media use, and behavior; value change and value transmission)

Prof. Dr. Matthijs Bogaards
Professor of Political Science
(Institutional design and public choice, especially electoral systems, ethnic conflict)

Prof. Dr. Hilke Brockmann
Professor of Sociology
(Framing and choice over time; social decision making and nudging institutions)

Prof. Dr. Gert Brunekreeft
Professor of Energy Economics
(Consistent and inconsistent agents’ behavior in public economic policy)

Prof. Dr. Jan Delhey
Professor of Sociology
(Trust and decision, redistributive justice)

Prof. Dr. Dennis A.V. Dittrich
Professor of Behavioral Economics
(Evolutionary game theory, labor economics, industrial organization, experimental economics, heuristics and biases)

Prof. Dr. Philipp Genschel
Professor of Political Science
(Risk taking, uncertainty, adaptive preference formation, ex post rationalization)

Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas
Professor of Psychology
(Intuition and affective processes, psycho-physiological indices of decision processes (somatic markers))

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kühnen
Professor of Psychology
(Meta-cognitive heuristics, gender-stereotypes, cultural differences in judgment, decision making, and behavior)

Prof. Dr. Christoph Lattemann
Professor of Business Administration and Information Management
(Information Management and Systems, Corporate Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility, E-Finance/International Investment, International Management, E-Learning)

Prof. Dr. Guido Möllering
Professor of Organization and Management
(Inter-organizational Relationships, International Management, Markets and Organizational Fields, Trust)

Prof. Dr. Steven Ney
Professor of Policy Sciences
(Social Entrepreneurship, Social Learning, Democracy and the Policy-Process)

Prof. Dr. Bettina Olk
Professor of Psychology
(Decisions with competing information and response options, cognitive control and aging, neuropsychology and decisions)

Prof. Dr. Achim Schlüter
Professor of Social Systems and Ecological Economics
( Institutional Economics, Ecological Economics, Experimental Economics)

Prof. Dr. Margrit Schreier
Professor of Empirical Methods in Humanities & Social Sciences
(Sampling and case selection in small-N studies, interviews, content analysis, mixed methods designs)

Prof. Dr. Marco Verweij
Professor of Political Science
(Decision-making on wicked problems using plural rationalities)

Prof. Dr. Sven C. Voelpel
Professor of Business Administration
(Leadership, teams, diversity, demographic change, knowledge and innovation)

Prof. Dr. Adalbert F.X. Wilhelm
Professor of Statistics
(Decision support systems, exploratory data analysis, data mining)

Prof. Dr. Katja Windt
Bernd Rogge Professor of Global Production Logistics
(Decision making in logistics systems under highly dynamic conditions and multi-criterial target systems)

Graduates who complete our 3-year Decision Sciences PhD program will be in the excellent position to make top-careers within and outside academia in business, in public administration, within public or private organizations, on a national and the international level.

The following degrees in the Decision Sciences PhD program can be obtained:

• Business Administration
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Electrical Engineering
• International Logistics
• Management
• Methods
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Statistics