Dynamic Decision Making Workshop — Sydney 2026

Dragan recently attended and presented at Dynamic Decision Making: Minds, Models, and Markets, a two-day workshop held on 14–15 April 2026 at the University of Sydney, organised by Agnieszka Tymula and Nanyin Yang. Timed to follow the ESA Asia/Pacific Meeting 2026, it brought together researchers from finance, economics, psychology, and neuroscience — a combination that made for an unusually rich two days.

The Programme

The workshop covered a wide range of topics united by the question of how decisions are made, represented, and revised over time. Across five sessions and a closing panel, talks addressed the neural and computational bases of risky choice, the role of perceptual and cognitive noise in shaping preferences, belief formation under costly information, the co-evolution of decision and confidence processes, intertemporal choice and quasi-hyperbolic discounting, reference-dependent preferences and heterogeneity, the limits of memory in economic decision-making, and how graph design and visual framing influence belief updating. The programme also included a panel discussion on interdisciplinary publication, with Hilke Plassmann, Carsten Murawski, Elise Payzan-Le Nestour, and Ryan Oprea reflecting candidly on the structural challenges of publishing across disciplinary boundaries — a conversation that felt timely given the range of methods on display.

Keynote Speakers

Three keynote lectures anchored the programme:

• Hilke Plassmann — Octapharma Chaired Professor of Decision Neuroscience, INSEAD & Paris Brain Institute (ICM), Sorbonne University.
• Elise Payzan-Le Nestour — Professor of Finance, UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales.
• Carsten Murawski — Professor of Finance and Director of the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets (CBMM), University of Melbourne.

Dragan's Talk

Building on Cognitive Imprecision Theory, the talk examined how experimentally induced perceptual noise affects risky decision-making — and when. Using a combined EEG and behavioural paradigm, the study showed that higher noise increases risk aversion and decreases value sensitivity, that these effects are reflected in early neural representations of expected payoffs (emerging ~600 ms after stimulus onset), and that those representations predict choices on a trial-by-trial basis — pointing toward a neural reward mechanism distinct from classic dopaminergic pathways.

Thanks to Agnieszka Tymula and Nanyin Yang for putting together such a stimulating event, and to all participants for the quality of the discussions. Full details on the workshop website.