Concentration Chair: Jane Kim
Students in the Decision Sciences concentration can expect to gain skills in quantitative techniques that are used for informing decision-making at the individual and population levels, including decision analysis, risk analysis, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, disease and policy simulation modeling, and behavioral decision theory. Examples of the type of research they pursue includes evaluating the harm-benefits tradeoff of new medical technologies or pharmaceuticals, modeling the cost-effectiveness of public health policies, and the measurement of health preferences, including quality of life. After they graduate, these students most often work in academia, but also in industry or health care consulting. An important difference between this concentration and other tracks is that decision science research aims to quantify tradeoffs of harms versus benefits to directly inform a decision being made under conditions of uncertainty.