Paul Johnson
Carlson School of Management
Decision Sciences

     In general, we assume that performance is based on experience. This idea is at the heart of much professional training and credentialing. It is also a common finding in research literature. There are, nevertheless, a surprising number of settings in work and daily life in which we expect success, but there is little opportunity for experience. One factor limiting experience is change. In some settings features of the task in question may vary widely (and unpredictably) so that just as patterns become familiar, the elements comprising them change. An example from our work is troubleshooting in semi-conductor manufacturing.  A second factor contributing to lack of experience is low frequency of occurrence. In some settings instances of specific patterns occur only seldom in the life of a single individual. In our work this includes fraud detection, as well as the treatment by primary-care physicians of patients with a chronic disease such as Type 2 diabetes.  My current research focuses on understanding how individuals use information to make decisions in settings of low frequency and high novelty. I am especially interested in the conditions under which error and decision failure occur and strategies that are developed to detect and overcome the consequences of ambiguous and incomplete information. My work is currently funded by two multi-year government grants.

• Grazioli, S., Smith, K., & Johnson, P.E. (2004). “Managing Risk in Social Exchange,” In K. Smith, J. Shanteau, and P. Johnson (Eds.).  Psychological Investigations of Competence in Decision Making.  New York: Cambridge University Press.  71-123.
  
  
• Johnson, P.E., Veazie, P.J., O’Connor, P.J., Potthoff, S.J., Kochevar, L., Verma, D., & Dutta, P. (2002). Understanding Variation in Chronic Disease Outcomes.  Health Care Management Science, 5(2), 175-189
  
  
• Johnson, P.E., Grazoli, S., Jamal, K., & Berryman, R.G. (2001).  Detecting Deception: Adversarial Problem Solving in a Low Base-Rate World.  Cognitive Science, 25, 355-392.

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