Robin M. Hogarth, an emeritus professor of the Department of Economics and Business at Pompeu Fabra University, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Association for Decision Making (EADM), an interdisciplinary organization devoted to the study of normative, descriptive and prescriptive theories of decision making.

This is the first edition of this award, which seeks to recognize the success and contributions of a person who has dedicated their research to the field of decision making, particularly within the EADM setting. Robin M. Hogarth collected the award on 20 August during the Subjective Probability Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM 2023) congress, held in Vienna.

Robin M. Hogarth:  "The award is due to the many colleagues and students who illuminated my professional career, and I thank them for sharing my journey with them”

After collecting the award from Eldad Yechiam, president-elect of the EADM, Robin M. Hogarth gave the lecture “Reflections on judgmental ability”, in which he recalled the first SPUDM congress he attended, in 1973, which was held at the University of Rome.

During that distant conference, Robin M. Hogarth himself posed a question to one of the speakers, related to human judgement, and in his speech in Vienna he took the opportunity to reflect on how knowledge on this subject has evolved: “How good is human judgement?”, “What can we say [about the validity of human judgement] fifty years after 1973?”, he wondered.

Some of his answers, by way of conclusion, were that cognitive biases in probabilistic tasks are real, but can be overcome with specific training; that an overall assessment cannot be made because it is not clear what the population of judgements is, and that the human judgemental system is extraordinarily adaptable.

At the beginning of his intervention, professor Hogarth stated that “it is a great honour to receive this award for lifetime contributions. However, although I am the person who receives the award, I would not be in this position if I hadn’t –over the years— had such a remarkable group of colleagues and students with whom to collaborate. So, the award is due to the many colleagues and students who illuminated my professional career, and I thank them for sharing my journey with them”.

An expert on the psychology of judgement and decision making

Robin M. Hogarth is an emeritus professor at the UPF Department of Economics and Business, which he joined in the year 2000, and where he has enjoyed an extensive academic career: in the first stage, until 2012, he was an ICREA research professor. He is still working on his own research projects today.

Prior to coming to UPF, he worked for some 20 years at the University of Chicago (where he received his doctorate in 1972). There, where he was a Wallace W. Booth professor of Behavioral Science, he served as vice-dean and director of the Center for Decision Research, and helped establish its Executive MBA programme in Europe.

His research has mainly focused on the psychology of judgement and decision making, and he has published several books in these fields, the latest of which, together with Emre Soyer, is entitled The Myth of Experience: Why We Learn the Wrong Lessons and Ways to Correct Them (New York. Public Affairs, 2020). Former president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the European Association for Decision Making, he was made an honorary doctor by the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2007.