Decision Making under Uncertainty: Simone Cerreia Vioglio Wins an ERC Starting Grant

On Tuesday, 1 March, a research project that has won a European Research Council (ERC) grant will start at Bocconi: SDDM-TEA (Static and Dynamic Decision Making under Uncertainty: Theory and Applications) by Simone Cerreia Vioglio. The Associate Professor at the Department of Decision Sciences and IGIER fellow won a Starting Grant, i.e. one of the grants reserved for younger researchers.

"Our research plan has two main objectives", says Cerreia Vioglio. "First, we aim to show how different approaches and concepts in Decision Theory are connected to each other. Literature has highlighted many behavioral phenomena, such as the incompleteness of preferences, that suggest departures from the standard expected utility model. Well, we'd like to develop comprehensive models in which these biases are linked to each other".

"Second", Cerreia Vioglio continues, "ambiguity – that is the not measurable component of uncertainty, as opposed to the measurable component, that we name risk – has been studied mostly in static, atemporal contexts. We intend to develop a general theory of recursive intertemporal preference models under uncertainty to address this important issue".

The project will last 60 months and has been funded with ca. €650,000.

This grant confirms the status of world reference point for the study of uncertainty in Decision Theory acquired by the Bocconi Department of Decision Sciences and it confirms IGIER as a hub for the management of frontier research projects. The very same ERC has recently acknowledged Massimo Marinacci with an outstanding second Advanced Grant.