FROM THE PRESIDENT

The 1997 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia has come and gone, and I would like to thank the program committee (Gretchen Chapman, Bill Goldstein, and Sandy Schneider) for their hard work in putting together an interesting program. As our society has grown and more members are attending the meeting, it has become increasingly difficult to balance the desire to provide a large number of researchers with the opportunity to present their work against the benefits of our meeting format in the good old days: no parallel sessions and the leisure of hour-long or half-hour talks. There are bound to be differences in opinion about the optimality of the compromise between breadth and depth in our current meeting format, and as your new president I have gotten to hear a lot of them. On average, however, most of you seem to be opposed to even shorter talks or more parallel sessions to allow a larger number of speakers to present their work. What this means, of course, is that sooner or later one of your submissions will be rejected as a talk and relegated to the poster-session category. It is easy to take that as a personal insult (and I speak from personal experience), but please don't. It took me years after I had a talk proposal rejected, to submit another one. Now that I think about it, I actually never submitted another one and subsequently only talked at J/DM meetings when invited. Let me suggest that you not fall prey to the same false one-trial learning. It's a good example of the fundamental attribution error. To make the review process fairer and more transparent, the program committee will institute a formal two-class priority policy for talk submissions, starting next year. Submissions by members who did not talk at the previous meeting will be assigned greater priority than those of members who did get a chance to talk the previous year. For the time being (and until it becomes financially prohibitive to do so) we will continue our policy of giving every member a chance to present his or her work as a poster.

What other noteworthy developments emerged from the meeting of the Executive Board this year? In the spirit of more positive reinforcement, we decided to institute two new awards: an award given to the best poster presented by a student at our annual meeting and an achievement award given at irregular intervals to a senior researcher in the field. These new awards will complement the existing Einhorn Memorial award given biannually to a young investigator. If you have creative suggestions on how to name the new senior award, let me know. The society also endorsed the efforts of Ward Edwards to organize a joint international meeting of decision making and decision analysis societies of different persuasions and nationalities in London (UK) in the spring of the year 2000. Entitled the "Century of Bayes Celebration" to reflect the millenial date of the meeting, the meeting is designed to provide for an information exchange about the theories, applications, methods, and tools of organizations concerned with the understanding and improvement of decision processes and outcomes around the world. Our society will be joining a growing list of other organizations in pledging their participation: the Decision Analysis Society (DAS) of INFORMS; the European Association for Decision Making (EADM), formerly known as SPUDM; the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA); and an American association of Bayesian Lawyers. One of our own members, Larry Phillips at the London School of Economics has graciously accepted the responsibility of managing the local logistics to make the meeting possible. This meeting will take place in addition to our regular national meeting that year.

Page A-2 December, 1997 J/DM Newsletter

Obituary: Jane Beattie (1960-1997)
Announcement of Jane Beattie Memorial Fund and Call for Contributions

Jane Beattie passed away this past March after a valiant year-long battle against a cancer of unknown primary origin. She is survived by her husband, David Weir, and their three children. Those of us who had the good fortune to know her are still stunned by her untimely death.

Events like this put to test the religious beliefs of those who hold them and for others are cruel reminders of the ultimate wantonness of life. Jane, however, would have been the last person to dwell on such topics. She was an optimist against difficult odds without the slightest trace of pollyannaism. She worked her way out of several trying situations over the years, including an episode of lung cancer in her husband which they successfully fought and the necessity of having to give up a rewarding life in Chicago in order to find positions in the same city and to place their young family on familiar British territory.

It is in this forward looking and constructive spirit that was so much part of Jane that some of her friends have turned their sorrow into action and have set out to commemorate and celebrate her life and achievements in various ways. One of them is a book that is being edited by Jon Baron, Graham Loomes, and myself, that will weave together the different strands of Jane's research. Entitled "Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making: Essays in Honor of Jane Beattie," the book will integrate contributions by Jane, her collaborators, and other researchers who were inspired by her research. A special session in Jane's memory at the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia provided a sampling from the topics covered by the book. The book itself will serve as a memorial and lasting legacy to her family and the J/DM community.

The second action by her friends, for which Joshua Klayman has taken the lead, has been to set up the Jane-Beattie-Memorial-Fund. The fund will pay the travel expenses of young foreign decision researchers who want to come to the US to present their work and exchange ideas with researchers at American universities or conferences. It will be administered by a committee appointed by the SJDM board. Many of us have enjoyed and profited from the ideas and creative energy that young decision researchers from abroad contribute to our collective enterprise. Jane was a prime example of the synergy that such exchange brings, and we hope that her memorial fund will provide many other young researchers with the financial support to foster such cross-national interactions. So far, a small group of close friends have contributed about $4,000 in seed money, and our society and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM) each have pledged $500. In addition to that, proceeds from the sale of the book in her memory will go into the fund.

To the extent that you were touched by Jane's death, Josh Klayman and I would like to encourage you to make a contribution to the fund. To do so, send a check in US dollars made out to "SJDM Beattie Memorial Fund" to:

          Joshua Klayman
          Graduate School of Business
          University of Chicago
          1101 East 58th Street
          Chicago, IL 60637

Page A-3 December, 1997 J/DM Newsletter

Ask not what your society can do for, but what you can do for your society!

The board is soliciting your nominations, including self-nominations, for various offices and committees. I will be happy to answer questions about the associated responsibilities.

NOMINATIONS

New Student Poster Award Committee      _______________________

Einhorn Memorial Award Committee        _______________________

Beattie Memorial  Fund Committee        _______________________
(see above)

Program Committee                       _______________________

Executive Board                         _______________________

President                               _______________________

Please send your nominations to me by e-mail, or by regular mail using the self-mailer on the back, no later than February 28.

Elke Weber
1885 Neil Avenue
Columbus OH 43210
weber.211@osu.edu

Page A-4 December, 1997 J/DM Newsletter

Nominations Mailer