KD²SCHOOL FOCUS
As a publicly sponsored and neutrally coordinated program, the KD²School opens up a research field that is at present primarily “investigated” with profit-oriented or political goals.
Economic decisions in business and in everyday life are increasingly supported by IT-based systems. As a result, these systems effectively operate as “cast in code” institutions and processes, and their design influences decision makers’ interactions and behaviors. The interplay between economic decision making and system design is at the core of the KD²School as it lays the foundations for the transformation of static systems into dynamic, adaptive systems.
Generally speaking, all decision-making is inherently embedded in a dynamically changing context comprising of personal (e.g., stress), task-related (e.g., complexity), and environmental factors (e.g., incentives). The key challenge then is to utilize this data and design economic institutions and their IT realizations to dynamically adapt to the context of a decision situation with the goal of improving decisions and/or reducing effort without loss of decision quality.