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Call for Workshops: 8th Invitational Choice Symposium
May 12-16, 2010
Ocean Reef Club, North Key Largo, Florida

The University of Miami and the University of Technology, Sydney will co-host the 8th triennial Invitational Choice Symposium. The Symposium will begin Wednesday evening, May 12, and run through noon Sunday, May 16, 2007 at the Ocean Reef Club, a private club/resort on the north tip of Key Largo, Florida (http://www.oceanreef.com/). The Ocean Reef Club is 50-minutes south of Miami International Airport. It offers world-class lodging and conference facilities as well as golf, tennis, fishing, swimming, and snorkeling in Biscayne National Park, home to the world’s third-longest living coral reef.

The Symposium brings together leading cross-disciplinary researchers working on understanding and predicting choice and decision processes. The aim of the Symposium is to provide a highly productive environment in which leading researchers can meet to assess the state of existing knowledge and set future research priorities in well-defined topical areas related to choice and decision making. This announcement is a call for proposals for workshop topics.

Priority will be given to workshop proposals that focus on general themes that will be of general interest and importance to choice and decision making. Although we will not strictly rule out proposals that are largely of interest to one discipline or field, we will give priority to topics with broad relevance and significance. Ideally, proposed workshop participants also should represent a variety of backgrounds and different academic disciplines. Each workshop will be attended by about 10-12 participants who have made significant contributions to the topic area, or based on contributions in cognate or related areas, can be expected to make significant contributions. Participants are expected to attend the entire symposium and actively participate in the activities and discussions of their workshop. Of particular note and significance is the final session of the conference when summary presentations from all workshops are presented.

The local organizing committee and steering committee will select approximately 10-12 of the submitted proposals to take part in the Symposium. An additional 2-4 workshops will be organized and/or solicited by the local organizing committee. Workshop chairs/co-chairs will take the lead in organizing sessions and recruiting participants. Chairs/co-chairs work with participants to develop and set an agenda for their specific workshop prior to attending the Symposium.

The outcome of each workshop is a review and/or position paper that integrates and synthesizes work in the research topic area and provides directions for future research that can advance knowledge in the area. The collection of papers will appear in a special issue of Marketing Letters in 2010 or 2011.

If you would like to submit a workshop proposal, please submit the materials shown below electronically in a single document (in Word or .pdf format) to organizers at the conference email address, choiceconference@miami.edu no later than September 1, 2009. We will notify all proposal submitters about the disposition of their proposals no later than October 1st, 2009.

Proposal Requirements:

• Name of workshop Chair/Co-Chairs (no more than 4) and their job affiliations
• Title of workshop
• Description of workshop topic (this may include a list of relevant papers, open research questions, etc), which should include a statement of its significance and how choice and decision-making research in general are likely to benefit from the discussions and conclusions of the workshop.
• A tentative list of the set of participants who would be targeted to participate, and their status (i.e., whether they have been contacted or not).

Again, all proposals should be emailed to choiceconference@miami.edu.

In the case of accepted workshop proposals, we will ask for a list of ALL proposed participants and their job affiliations. This list should not exceed 10 names in total and must include a mix of researchers from different disciplines.

We also would like to note that based on prior Symposia experience, we expect to receive a number of workshop proposals. Typically, there are many more workshops proposed than the 14-16 chosen for the Symposium. Also, typically, the committee has to make some hard decisions, with the consequence that some potentially interesting proposals will not be represented at the Symposium. As previously noted, preference will be given to topics of broad interest and significance, with narrow topics and topics largely of interest to a particular discipline being given much less priority. Research on choice and decision making now occurs in a wide array of fields, such as economics, marketing, psychology, transportation, political science, sociology, medicine, nursing, ecology, statistics, mathematics, physics, etc. The 2010 Symposium aims to broaden the audience, the discussions and the topics to embrace as many views as possible and to encourage the emergence of new ideas and ways forward as possible given the limitations of a 14-16 workshop Symposium.

We look forward to receiving a number of interesting, exciting and significant proposals and a highly successful 8th Invitational Choice Symposium. We hope to see you in Key Largo in May 2010.

Sincerely,

Robert Meyer
The University of Miami
The University of Pennsylvania

Jordan Louviere
University of Technology,
Sydney

Michael Keane
University of Technology,
Sydney

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