117. Kai Ruggeri: Global collaborations, Prospect Theory, and temporal discounting

Sep 15, 2025

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Kai Ruggeri is professor for health policy and management at Columbia University. We talk about his global collaborations, in which they studied various important decision-making aspects, including Prospect Theory and temporal discounting.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Why Kai studied stats anxiety in his PhD, and then moved to broader policy questions

0:09:15: Replicating the original Prospect Theory paper across the world

0:30:01: Adversarial collaborations and choosing which findings are worth being replicated

0:38:31: How to run global collaborations

0:56:25: Overlooked aspects of these global collaborations

1:03:59: Should we collect data from non-Western countries without local collaborators?

1:10:24: A book or paper more people should read

1:16:38: Something Kai wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:27:50: Advice for postdocs

Podcast links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Kai's links

Website: https://geni.us/ruggeri-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/ruggeri-scholar
BlueSky: https://geni.us/ruggeri-bsky

Ben's links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References, links & notes

Junior Researcher Programme: https://jrp.pscholars.org/

Today, Israel uses the Shekel, but when Kahneman & Tversky did research there, they used the Israeli pound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_pound

Prolific: https://www.prolific.com/

Besample: https://besample.app/

Kahneman's final decision: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/daniel-kahneman-assisted-suicide-9fb16124

Gal & Rucker (2018). The loss of loss aversion: Will it loom larger than its gain? J Cons Psych.

Kahneman & Tversky (1979). Prospect theory: an analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica.

Lewis (2016). The undoing project.

Macher, ... & Ruggeri (2012). Statistics anxiety, trait anxiety, learning behavior, and academic performance. Europ J psych edu.

Macher, ... Ruggeri, ... (2013). Statistics anxiety, state anxiety during an examination, and academic achievement. British J Edu Psych.

Mellers, Hertwig & Kahneman (2001). Do frequency representations eliminate conjunction effects? An exercise in adversarial collaboration. Psych Sci.

Parks, Joireman & Van Lange (2013). Cooperation, trust, and antagonism: How public goods are promoted. Psych sci in the public interest.

Ruggeri, ... & Folke (2020). Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk. Nat Hum Behav.

Ruggeri, ... & Folke (2021). The general fault in our fault lines. Nat Hum Behav.

Ruggeri, ... & Toscano (2022). The globalizability of temporal discounting. Nat Hum Behav.

Ruggeri (Ed.). (2018). Behavioral insights for public policy: concepts and cases.

Thaler (2015). Misbehaving.