Summary of Role
The Research Fellow will work closely with Prof Mark Fenton-O’Creevy and in collaboration with partners across Europe on a major European Union funded project. The overarching goal of this project is to produce both knowledge and applications capable of improving financial decision making, via learning interventions. More generally, the project uses and also evaluates the potential of games, game technologies, and sensors as components in learning support environments, and as tools to conduct experimental and field research.
A key aspect of the project is a series of studies of decision-making among financial traders and investors. A particular focus will be the role of emotion and emotion regulation in financial decision-making and the development of decision-making expertise. The Research Fellow will take a leading role in these studies and will contribute to considering their implications for the design of technology supported learning interventions to improve decision-making among the target groups.
· Design and conduct research studies which examine the role of biases, emotions and emotion regulation in financial decision-making, including differences in these effects between novice and expert decision-makers.
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THE PROJECT: Boosting Deliberate Practice and Handling Biases through Immersive Cognitive and Emotional Reinforcement Strategies & Tools (xDELIA)
Focusing on a broad range of subjects from traders and private investors to ordinary members of the public, xDelia will exploit new and emerging technologies to explore financial decision-making processes, including the role of emotion in people’s decisions. Much financial training has, to date, focused purely on imparting knowledge and increasing people’s understanding. However, people often may have appropriate knowledge, but despite this they go on to be ruled by their attitudes, habits, or emotional states. Investigating this, the project is to develop new, technologically supported approaches to training and support for non-formal and informal learning in real-world settings to tackle the challenges faced by people and businesses when they make financial decisions.
Spanning three years, the project will use cutting-edge gaming and sensor technologies throughout. Game based technologies are becoming proven as a method of learning, particularly as they can place people in virtual situations, and the xDelia project will be employing these to analyse behavioural patterns and to support the informal learning process. Alongside this, wearable sensor equipment detecting pulse rates and skin-inductance will help build a picture of a person’s emotional state at the point of, and in the run up to, a financial decision. Moreover, eye tracking and automated event logging completes this picture with behavioural profile data. This technology will have three principal roles. First behavioural and emotion state data will be used to extend our understanding of judgmental biases or emotion regulation in novice and expert decision-makers. Second, the collected data will provide evidence of engagement with learning game approaches developed in the project. Third, such data can provide an important source of feedback in learning support technologies where the learning goal concerns improvements in emotion regulation or reduction in the impact of decision-biases.
The overarching goal of this project is to produce both knowledge and applications capable of improving financial decision making, via learning interventions. More generally, the project uses and also evaluates the potential of games, game technologies, and sensors as components in learning support environments, and as tools to conduct experimental and field research. The choice of these technologies for improving learning outcomes is motivated by recent findings in the expertise and decision making literature. These point to the importance for competence building of contextual and psychological validity; and of the need for timely and relevant feedback. Games and sensors allow us to incorporate context validity and feedback into learning support environments.
Consortium partners
1(coord.)
Centre Internacional de Mètodes Numèrics en Enginyeria
CIMNE
Spain
2
Forschungszentrum Informatik
FZI
Germany
3
Open University
OU
United Kingdom
4
Blekinge Tekniska Högskola – Game and Media Arts Laboratory
BTH
Sweden
5
Erasmus Univ. Rotterdam – Erasmus Centre for Neuroeconomics
EUR
The Netherlands
6
University of Bristol – Personal Finance Research Centre
UNIVBRIS
United Kingdom
7
Saxo Bank A/S
SAXO
Denmark
The project consists of seven of work packages, described below. The Research Fellow’s role will be primarily focussed on work-package 2 but will also contribute to and draw on results from other work packages (mostly WP4 and 5).
WP1 – Project Management
Purpose – To manage the project with the support from the Project Management Committee in a way that ensures the achievement of all scientific and technological goals of the project, with effective and efficient use of the available human, material, and financial resources.
WP2 – Interventions – Financial Trading & Investment
Purpose – To produce empirical knowledge on decision making in trading and investment practice and, using this knowledge, to design and pilot learning support in the form of intervention packages that embody a practice-based learning approach. To make use of sensor and game technology for these purposes, that is, as research tools and as artefacts in the learning support intervention.
WP3 – Interventions – Financial Capability & Personal Finance
Purpose – To produce – similarly to WP2 – empirical knowledge on behaviour, attitudes, and motivations in the context of personal finance and, using this knowledge, to design and pilot learning support in the form of an intervention package that embodies a practice-based learning approach. To make use of sensor and game technology for these purposes, that is, as research tools and as artefacts in the learning support intervention.
WP4 – Cognitive Games: Design and Implementation
Purpose – To design and implement game prototypes and the game contents for WP2 and WP3 in a participatory design environment. To produce a series of prototypes, from exploratory research instruments for knowledge and requirements elicitation, to artefacts that can be used within the application domains for learning support of trading, investment and financial capability decision making. To deliver the software artefacts for intervention packages developed for WP2 and WP3.
WP5 – Wearable Sensors and Psychophysiology
Purpose – To provide sensor systems and software components for the detection and recognition of emotional and cognitive states of users beyond laboratory setups. To equip the learning support artefacts in our intervention packages with the necessary data capturing and signal processing tools to detect cognitive biases and emotional states of decision makers in real-time. To develop unobtrusive, cost-effective monitoring systems for emotional states. To develop software components for easy integration of the monitoring systems in game designs.
WP6 – Evaluation
Purpose – To develop an evaluation framework that provides the overarching framework for the ongoing formative evaluation studies. To feed evaluation findings iteratively to ongoing project development and activities. To collate and share evaluation studies between the central evaluation team providing overall steer and guidance for the actual evaluations studies undertaken by the relevant local partners.
WP7 – Dissemination and Exploitation
Purpose – To disseminate the project activities and by (a) traditional dissemination by broadcasting and (b) a strategy of dissemination by engagement that actively involves stakeholders in activities that foster an understanding of the issues we address and the solutions we offer. To consolidate the associated partner network as an effective channel for dissemination results across Europe and extending it to cover the trader and investor case. To make some key outputs available as open content learning objects, possibly within a community-based social learning model.
4. The Team
Mark Fenton-O’Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Open University. He has a significant track record in research into influences on the decision-making, risk-taking and behaviour of traders in investment banks. He also played a major role in setting up a government funded centre at the Open University, the centre for Practice-Based Professional Learning, and received a National Teaching Fellowship for his work developing practice-based approaches to learning. He has acted as an academic advisor to the BBC2 series ‘The Money programme’.
Publications include:
FENTON-O’CREEVY, M.P., Gooderham, P, Nordhaug, O. (2008) HRM in US subsidiaries in Europe and Australia: Centralisation or Autonomy? Journal of International Business Studies. 39(1): 151-166.
FENTON-O’CREEVY, M.P., Soane, E., Nicholson, N. and Willman, P. (2008) Thinking feeling and deciding: The influence of emotions on the decision-making and performance of traders. Academy of Management Conference, Anaheim, CA, August 2008.
FENTON-O’CREEVY, M.P., and Wood, S.J. (2007) Diffusion of Human Resource Management Systems in UK Headquartered Multinational Enterprises: Integrating Institutional and Strategic Choice Explanations, European Journal of International Management, 1(4)
Willman, P., FENTON-O’CREEVY, M., Soane, E., Nicholson, N. (2006). Noise Trading and The Management of Operational Risk; Firms, Traders and Irrationality in Financial Markets. Journal of Management Studies 43(6):1357-74.
FENTON-O'CREEVY, M.P., Nicholson, N., Soane, E. and William, P. (2005) Traders - Risks, Decisions, and Management in Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926948-3
Wood, S. J. and FENTON-O'CREEVY, M.P. (2005) ‘Direct involvement, Representation and Employee Voice in UK Multinationals in Europe, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 11(1).,
FENTON-O’CREEVY, M., Nicholson, N. and Soane, E., Willman, P. (2003) Trading on illusions: Unrealistic perceptions of control and trading performance. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology 76, 53-68.
Willman, P., FENTON-O’CREEVY, M., Soane, E., Nicholson, N. (2002) “Traders, managers and loss aversion in investment banking: a field study” Accounting Organisations and Society 27(1/2), p85-98.
The project will also provide the opportunity to collaborate with partner organisations which represent a wide range of relevant expertise including cognitive neuroscience, experimental economics, serious game design, and wearable sensor technologies.
