Prof. Rann Smorodinsky joined the Faculty in 1997, He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1995. Prior to joining the Faculty Rann was an assistant professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, from 1995–1997.
Rann’s research is in Game Theory with special interest in learning, privacy, social networks and mechanism design.
Prof. Rann Smorodinsky serves as Dean of the Faculty of Data And Decision Sciences since January 2022.
Miriam Erez is professor emeritus of organizational psychology and management, and vice-dean of the MBA programs at the Technion Faculty of Data And Decision Sciences. Erez served as dean of the faculty from 1996 to 1998. She is the founder and chair of the Knowledge Center for Innovation at the Technion, and is the chairperson of the hiCenter entrepreneurial campus in Haifa. Her three main research areas are: innovation management—“the journey of the idea”; cross-cultural and global organizational behavior; and work motivation. Erez has co-authored and co-edited five books, as well as more than 100 journal papers and book chapters. She has also served as advisor to around 100 master’s students and doctoral students on their theses and dissertations.Erez received the 2002 IAAP Distinguished Scientific Award and the 2005 Israel Prize in Administrative Sciences. She is a fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the International Association of Applied Psychology.
She is associate editor of Journal of International Business Studies, and of the journal of Cross Cultural and Strategic Management, and she is on the consulting editors’ board of the Academy of Management Annals. Erez served as editor of Applied Psychology: An International Review and as an associate editor of the Journal of Managerial Psychology. She was on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, The Academy of Management Journal, and the Journal of Management.
Ido joined the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences in 1990 as a lecturer. He was promoted to full professor in 2004, and has held the “Women’s Division—ATS Academic Chair” since 2006. He was the head of the Behavioral Science Area, the head of the Technion section of the Max Wertheimer Minerva Center for Cognitive Research, and the head of the Technion group in the ICORE for Empirical Legal Studies of Decision Making, and the president of the European Association for Decision Making.
Ido has been a visiting research associate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh; a Michael A. Gould fellow at Columbia Business School; a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School; a fellow at the Israel Center of Advanced Studies; a visiting professor at Erasmus School of Economics; a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC); and a research environment professor at Warwick Business School.
Ido and his co-workers focus on three related lines of research. The first centers on the observation of a large difference between decisions that are made based on a description of the incentive structure, and decisions that are made based on experience: people tend to exhibit oversensitivity to rare events in decisions from description, and the opposite bias in decisions from experience. This observation, initially documented by Barron & Erev (2003) and now known as the experience-description gap (Hertwig & Erev, 2009), is important because mainstream behavioral economic research (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) focuses on decisions from description, while most of the efforts to apply it involve decisions from experience. Ido and his co-workers address this problem by the systematic study of decisions from experience.
A second line of research focuses on the difference between anomalies and forecasts. The leading models of choice behavior tend to focus on interesting anomalies. Since each model focuses on a few isolated anomalies, it is not easy to use these models to derive clear forecasts. That is, it Is not clear which of the leading models should be used to address a new choice problem. Ido and his co-workers try to address this problem by developing general models, and then organizing international choice prediction competitions in which they challenge other researchers to propose better models that can capture all the classical anomalies and allow ex ante predictions of behavior (see, for example: http://departments.agri.huji.ac.il/economics/teachers/ert_eyal/competition.htm ).
A third line of research centers on the practical implications of the basic research summarized above. The experience-description gap, and the models that best capture it, suggest that economic incentives are most effective when they ensure that socially desirable behavior maximizes payoff, and also minimizes the probability of regret. Ido and his co-authors use this observation to address distinct social and organizational problems. For example, they demonstrate that gentle rule enforcement methods are more effective in improving safety in industrial settings than traditional policies (see Erev & Roth, 2014).
