Dr Konstantinos Katsikopoulos MPhil (Athens), PhD (Massachusetts)
Head of Research at Department of Decision Analytics and Risk and Associate Professor (Reader) of Behavioural Operations
Dr Konstantinos Katsikopoulos is Head of Research at the Department of Decision Analytics and Risk and Associate Professor (Reader) of Behavioural Operations at the Southampton Business School. He is playing a key role in the emerging field of Behavioural Operations Research, and is the academic chair of The OR Society's corresponding Special Interest Group.
Konstantinos is also very active in the interdisciplinary area of Bounded Rationality, co-organizing the Annual Winter School in India on the topic. He serves on the editorial board of Judgment and Decision Making and the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
Konstantinos works on integrating standard decision theory with the simple rules of thumb people actually use. He has made contributions to the understanding of the conditions under which simple models outperform more complex ones. He has engaged with government and businesses on problems, characterized by complexity and uncertainty, in economics, management, and health. Konstantinos's work has been funded by organizations such as the NASA Ames Research Center, the German Science Foundation and the European Network for Excellence, published in academic journals such as Psychological Review, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological and the European Journal of Operational Research, and covered by newspapers and magazines such as the Tageszeitung, Founding Fuel and Science News. He regularly delivers lectures and short courses to academia and industry; Visit Prof. Konstantinos Katsikopoulos: David Blockley lectures in Systems for a lecture to a general audience and visit CogTalk June 2014: Blind to Reason? Cognitive illusions and (ir)rational thinking for a public debate on whether people think irrationally. Konstantinos is the lead author of the book, forthcoming by MIT Press, "Classification in the Wild: The Art and Science of Transparent Decision Making", with Özgür Şimşek (Bath), Marcus Buckmann (Bank of England) and Gerd Gigerenzer (Max Planck Institute), that presents a decision theory fit for practice.
Konstantinos studied applied mathematics and cognitive psychology in Athens and Freiburg and then obtained a PhD in operations research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Afterwards, he was a visiting Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and MIT; and an Associate Professor (W2) as well as Deputy Director at the Center for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Konstantinos welcomes inquiries from highly interested doctoral students. For information on PhD scholarships, visit Funding for postgraduate research (PhD) Programmes page.