Michal Król

Universitetet i Agder | UIA · School of Business and Law

Existing research shows that people can improve their decision skills by learning what experts paid attention to when faced with the same problem. However, in domains like financial education, effective instruction requires frequent, personalized feedback given at the point of decision, which makes it time-consuming for experts to provide and thus...

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real-world market data. Subjects learned about the presence/abse...

We propose a new method of quantifying the utility of visual information extracted from facial stimuli for emotion recognition. The stimuli are convolved with a Gaussian fixation distribution estimate, revealing more information in those facial regions the participant fixated on. Feeding this convolution to a machine-learning emotion recognition al...

As deviations from what is expected, anomalies are typically seen as an obstruction to making good predictions or an impulse to revise the predictive framework. Here, we consider a different possibility—that anomalies, particularly those related to cognitive processing, may be a valuable source of diagnostic information. More specifically, we hypot...

Existing research demonstrates that pre-decisional information sampling strategies are often stable within a given person while varying greatly across people. However, it remains largely unknown what drives these individual differences, that is, why in some circumstances we collect information more idiosyncratically. In this brief report, we presen...

As deviations from what is expected, anomalies are typically seen as an obstruction to making good predictions or an impulse to revise the predictive framework. Here, we consider a different possibility – that anomalies, particularly those related to cognitive processing, may be a valuable source of diagnostic information. More specifically, we hyp...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to investigate the strategic value of making a public payoff sacrifice (“burning money”) in a setting modelled after the battle-of-the-sexes game. Unlike prior studies, we find that subjects choose to burn money in a significant portion of decision trials and that burning makes the first movers more likel...

The aim of the study was not only to demonstrate whether eye-movement-based task decoding was possible but also to investigate whether eye-movement patterns can be used to identify cognitive processes behind the tasks. We compared eye-movement patterns elicited under different task conditions, with tasks differing systematically with regard to the...

The beauty contest game is widely used to study the determinants of strategic thinking. Here, we examine the role of theory of mind in strategic reasoning by comparing both performance and the reasoning process in participants with autism vs. typically developing controls. Pantelis and Kennedy (2017) reported a surprising lack of difference between...

We compared scanpath similarity in response to repeated presentations of social and nonsocial images representing natural scenes in a sample of 30 participants with autism spectrum disorder and 32 matched typically developing individuals. We used scanpath similarity (calculated using ScanMatch) as a novel measure of attentional bias or preference,...

Existing research has shown that human eye-movement data conveys rich information about underlying mental processes, and that the latter may be inferred from the former. However, most related studies rely on spatial information about which different areas of visual stimuli were looked at, without considering the order in which this occurred. Althou...

We used a perceptual closure task with Mooney images as stimuli to record eye-movement patterns in response to the same degraded image before and after perceptual learning in 21 adolescents and young adults with ASD and 23 sex-, age- and IQ-matched typically developing individuals. In the control group, we observed changes in the eye-movement patt...

Recent studies reported that the attraction effect, whereby inferior decoys cause choice reversals, fails to replicate if the choice options are presented in a pictorial rather than abstract numerical form. We argue that the pictorial setting makes the similarity between decoy and target salient, while the abstract one emphasizes the inferiority re...

Decisions are often delegated to experts chosen based on their past performance record which may be subject to noise. For instance, a person with little skill could still make a lucky decision that proves correct ex-post, while a skilled expert could make the best possible use of available information to reach a decision that, with hindsight, turns...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to investigate the strategic value of making 6 a public payoff sacrifice ("burning money") in a setting modeled after the battle-of-the-sexes game. Unlike prior studies, we find that subjects choose to burn money in a significant portion of decision trials and that burning makes the first movers more like...

We provide new evidence on retailers' pricing and advertising of store brands in the UK grocery markets. We analyse a simple Hotelling model in which retailers and manufacturers endogenously advertise their respective brands; we account for the impact of advertising on retailer--manufacturer bargaining and downstream competition. The model predicts...

We demonstrate “economies of experience” in eye-movement patterns, i.e. optimization of eye-movement patterns aimed at more efficient and less costly visual processing, similar to the priming-induced formation of sparser cortical representations or reduced reaction times. Participants looked at Mooney-type, degraded stimuli that were difficult to r...

We propose a novel method of using eye-tracking to study strategic decisions. The conventional approach is to hypothesize what eye-patterns should be observed if a given model of decision-making was accurate, and then proceed to verify if this occurs. When such hypothesis specification is difficult a priori, we propose instead to expose subjects to...

Predictions optimize processing by reducing attentional resources allocation to expected or predictable sensory data. Our study demonstrates that these saved processing resources can be then used on concurrent stimuli, and in consequence improve their processing and encoding. We illustrate this “trickle-down” effect with a dual task, where the prim...

This paper considers competition in supply functions in a homogeneous goods market in the absence of cost or demand uncertainty. In order to commit to a supply schedule, firms are required to build sufficient capacity to produce any quantity that may be prescribed by that schedule. When the cost of extra capacity (given the level of sales) is stric...

This paper examines a variant of the Hotelling two-stage mill-pricing duopoly game with “linear-quadratic†transport costs and the uniform customer distribution subject to a random shock. The demand is equally likely to be found anywhere in a fixed interval of feasible product characteristics, with the ex-post differentiation of tastes parametri...

This paper studies product differentiation decisions in a spatial duopoly with limited information on consumer demand. In particular, a situation is discussed in which the firms do not know the exact distribution of the random location of consumer demand and its responsiveness to price changes (measured by the scale of transport costs), but resolve...