Konstantinos Katsikopoulos

Professor of Behavioural Science, University of Southampton, UK

Business School for Research

Website at the University of Southampton

Vita

Konstantinos' work combines behavioural science with analytics: He uses experiments to understand lay and expert decision-making under conditions of radical uncertainty; he uses this understanding to develop models of how such decisions should be made, and tests several models using machine learning methods. This approach is a rare success - the models are both accurate and transparent.

Konstantinos' group has developed tools for difficult problems such as detecting threats at security checkpoints in Afghanistan while minimising civilian casualties, regulating UK investment banks without stifling financial innovation, and predicting the incidence of flu in the US more reliably than Big Data. Such psychologically inspired quantitative models help set high standards of transparency and effectiveness for approaches such as machine learning algorithms. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence for decision support, understanding the rationale behind decisions is critical, especially in sensitive areas, future epidemics and other critical events.

Research interests

  • Decision making: Prescriptive and descriptive
  • Modeling of human behavior
  • Behaviorally informed policy

Selected Publications

Gammoh, L. A., Dawson, I. G., & Katsikopoulos, K. (2023). How flood preparedness among Jordanian citizens is influenced by self-efficacy, sense of community, experience, communication, trust and training. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 87, 103585.

Katsikopoulos, K., & Canellas, M. (2022). Decoding human behavior with big data? Critical, constructive input from the decision sciences. Ai Magazine, 43(1), 126-138.

Kunc, M., & Katsikopoulos, K. V. (2022). Behavioural OR: Recent developments and future perspectives. The Palgrave Handbook of Operations Research, 721-733.

Katsikopoulos, K. V., Egozcue, M., & Garcia, L. F. (2022). A simple model for mixing intuition and analysis. European Journal of Operational Research, 303(2), 779-789.

Katsikopoulos, K. V., Şimşek, Ö., Buckmann, M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2022). Transparent modeling of influenza incidence: Big data or a single data point from psychological theory?. International Journal of Forecasting, 38(2), 613-619.