Ian Durbach

Room: 3.04 PD Hahn (North) building
Phone: (021) 650 5058
Fax: (021) 650 4773
Email: ian[dot]durbach[at]uct[dot]ac[dot]za

At the moment I lecture and convene two third-year courses in the applied statistics stream: STA3022F Research and Survery Statistics and STA3030F Inferential Statistics, and teach part of the Decision Modelling course in the honours program. I'm also a PhD student in the department under Prof Theo Stewart; the thesis is provisionally titled "Adaptive strategies for multiattribute decision making under uncertainty".

Current Research

I am mainly interested in individual and collective human decision-making behaviour involving choices between options whose outcomes are uncertain. The outcomes may be uncertain because they depend on certain conditions in the future that cannot be predicted for sure, because they are imprecisely measured, because information on the outcomes is only partial, or any combination of the three. I have mostly worked on the first type of uncertainty, and my specific interest is in developing simplified or heuristic models that can describe or aid this kind of decision-making. Though most of my research investigates individual decision makers, I also try to investigate collective decision-making behaviour by considering groups of decision making agents to be a dynamical system operating on a network, using the tools of network theory/small-world networks and agent-based modelling. I have some related interests in other applications of networks to socio-economic research problems like word-of-mouth sharing, corporate directorships, and research collaborations.

Some background

I grew up in Cape Town and went to the University of Cape Town for my undergraduate studies in Business Science and postgraduate degree in operational research, a masters dissertation titled "The treatment of uncertainty in multi-criteria decision modelling". I'm still mainly interested in this area. Between 2003 and 2005 I worked as a researcher-statistician in market research at The Customer Equity Company, and I still try and stay in contact with this interesting field. Things I enjoy doing outside of work are climbing, sea-kayaking (both as incompentantly as possible), hiking (a little more competantly but with more complaining) and reading. Some people whose work I admire are Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Herbert Simon. For a more detailed CV click here.

Journal articles

Conference proceedings