The current focus of my research interests has been in the fields of dynamic decision-making, system’s thinking, and modeling human behavior using experience-based approaches. I am also interested in topics concerning risk perception and risk attitudes in environmental decision making, situation awareness, cyber situation awareness, human factors, group decision making, social-cultural dilemmas in environmental decision making, and time preferences in environmental decision making.
As part of my dissertation research, I have focused on explaining public preferences to defer mitigation actions on climate change by applying three different fields of study. The first field is related to people’s misconceptions exhibited through their proportional-thinking bias in environmental problems (the wrong thinking that climate mitigation actions can be deferred to the future as later stabilizing emissions rapidly would also rapidly stabilize the carbon-dioxide concentration). The second field is related to people’s risk-preferences on climate mitigation actions (people have been found to show risk-seeking behavior for rare climate events, e.g., hurricanes, that incur heavy losses on account of people’s lack of regular experiences of these events). The third field is people’s time-preferences (people prefer to delay immediate payments for climate mitigation because it involves paying now, where the associated benefits are distant in the future and uncertain).
Under the first field, I have investigated three different interventions to reduce people’s use of their proportional-thinking bias. The first intervention is to provide people with correct and certain experiences of consequences of future climate change through computer-based games. The second intervention is to present an environmental problem such that people’s proportional-thinking and loss-aversion biases actually enable them to make more ecofriendly decisions. The third intervention is to physically present environmental problems using analogies like pictures and metaphors, i.e., the physical representation, that are common and that people understand (e.g., GHG concentration as water in a bathtub which is filled due to “emissions tap” and emptied due to an “absorption drain”). Under the second and third fields on people’s risk- and time- preferences, effective interventions are to make people experience high probability of future climate consequences that are also near in time and costly in the future. I have also tried to extend the study of people’s wait-and-see behavior on environmental problems from a single individual to groups of individuals. Here, I have investigated people’s wait-and-see behavior on climate change using a game-theory perspective that uses 2x2 games like the prisoner’s dilemma and chicken. In all, I have seven papers either under review, under revise and resubmit, or in press, covering these interventions.
Beyond my dissertation work and as a post-doctoral fellow, I have also extensively worked to investigate and model human behavior in several decision-making tasks and projects. For example, most recently, I have worked to develop behavioral models using decisions from experience approaches of security analysts that have to monitor online operations in corporate networks from threats of cyber-attack. The model predicts the accuracy and timeliness of decisions of an analyst to detect cyber-attacks in different cyber-attack scenarios and on account of prior experiences in analyst's memory.
Similarly, I have worked to develop models of human behavior in gambling and lottery playing activities. Here the cognitive models I have developed explain why and how people sample different lotteries and how they make repeated decisions in deciding for risky or safe lotteries over time. On this topic, I recently won a runners-up prize in a market-entry prediction competition (please see here), where the task was to determine the entry-rate of four human players that had to repeatedly decide to entry or stay out of a risky market.
In addition, I have also applied my cognitive modeling skills to investigate people's behavior while they negotiate in a prisoner's dilemma game and other social dilemmas like the tragedy of commons. Furthermore, through computational modeling, I have also modeled behavior of platoon leaders in the army and behavior of radar operators in a tactical battlefield. Finally, I have also extensive experience in modeling human behavior in control problems, e.g., control of weight due to diet and exercise, control of finances due to income and expenditure, and control of oil reserves due to exploration of new reserves and exploitation of current ones.
To see my recent publications visit my publications page.
In addition to the above research, I am also the Knowledge Editor of a popular Indian newspaper, Financial Chronicle, and have authored more than 200 articles (please see here).