1 Selecting research area and advisor, forming PhD committee 2 Preferable at the beginning of the program 3 Students are encouraged attending conferences and must present their own research at one international conference 4 Student may teach parts of a lecture/seminar under the advisor’s supervision 5 Student may give at most four 75-min lectures/seminars without the advisor being present 6 The student is expected to complete the dissertation thesis during the 5th and 6th semester. Two non-rejected articles in international journals with the student as first author may be considered as equivalent. Core Modules: (A) Judgment and Individual Decision Making This module will introduce normative and descriptive models of judgment and choice. Models will include the expected utility model and its variations, including a discussion on violations of the crucial axioms; random utility models; prospect theory; decision field theory; Bayesian models. The psychological approach to judgment and decision making will include heuristics and biases, support theory, adaptive decision making, ecological approaches, current models of human attention and cognitive control, models of affect and emotion as well as critical overviews over the most recent research in the above mentioned areas. (B) Decision Making in Social Contexts The aim of this module is to systematically analyze the impact of social, political, economic, and organizational environments on the processes and outcomes of individual and collective decision making. Building on inter-disciplinary findings, we look into success stories as well as into failures of decision making in markets, international institutions, firms, parliamentary parties, hospitals, religious groups or family networks. To learn about the structural premises and mechanics of social contexts on optimal decision making, teaching reflects most up-to date research from economics, political science, sociology, organizational science, and social psychology. (C) Research Statistics and Methods The program puts strong emphasis on excellent skills in experimental and social science methods and methodology. The methods curriculum commences with a mandatory written and oral placement test in research methods of decision sciences, offered immediately before the first semester of doctoral training starts. Fellows who exhibit insufficient methods skills in the placement test will be required to attend remedial courses during their first two semesters. Such courses are offered, in English, for undergraduate students of all BA programs of Jacobs University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Methods faculty will participate regularly in the Proposal Workshop/Colloquium that every fellow has to attend during her/his first semester of doctoral training. Participation of methods faculty in this course introduces fellows to the methods expertise at Jacobs University, while at the same time providing methods faculty with an overview of the methods training necessities of the fellows. The inclusion in the Proposal Workshop of methods faculty also aids the latter in determining the contents of the modularized Advanced Methods course offered to fellows in the second semester, and of the Tailored Methods Tutorials offered in the second and third semesters. The modularized Advanced Methods course will be structured in a way that 8 short modules (three course units each, presumably blocked to one or two days) will be offered by methods faculty. Such modules will focus on topics like "mathematical modeling" “advanced multivariate statistical analysis”, the “comparative case study approach”, “sampling and matching”, “strategies of triangulation in social research”, “small-n statistical procedures” and “discourse and document analysis”. From the offerings of the methods faculty every fellow selects 4 modules, which—together with an introductory phase in which all fellows participate—form the Advanced Methods course. In order to enhance fellows’ skills to engage in a mixed-methodology approach in their dissertation, fellows will be obliged to select—among the four modules of their course—at least one module from the quantitative and one from the qualitative methodological paradigm. The Tailored Methods Tutorials in the second and third semesters are lab-like colloquia that come close to a one-to-one tutoring. A fellow’s methods supervisor will work on dissertation data with the fellow and let other fellows who follow a very similar methodological approach benefit at the same time.

Graduates who complete our 3-year Decision Sciences PhD program will be in the excellent position to make top-careers within and outside academia in business, in public administration, within public or private organizations, on a national and the international level.