Applied visual analytics for economic decision-making

This paper introduces the application of visual analytics techniques as a novel approach for improving economic decision making. Particularly, we focus on two known problems where subjects' behavior consistently deviates from the optimal, the Winner's and Loser's Curse. According to economists, subjects fail to recognize the profit-maximizing decision strategy in both the Winner's and Loser's curse because they are unable to properly consider all the available information. As such, we have created a visual analytics tool to aid subjects in decision making under the Acquiring a Company framework common in many economic experiments. We demonstrate the added value of visual analytics in the decision making process through a series of user studies comparing standard visualization methods with interactive visual analytics techniques. Our work presents not only a basis for development and evaluation of economic visual analytic research, but also empirical evidence demonstrating the added value of applying visual analytics to general decision making tasks.