Mentor: Ryan Jessup
Department: Management Sciences
What Dr. Jessup said about Lily: Lily received an undergraduate research grant to work with me on a project that tested whether leading economic models could predict choice in a simple roulette wheel task that encouraged irrational choice. Her help was essential in discovering that some of the most prominent economic models failed to accurately predict choice behavior in our simple task. Furthermore, Lily was required to conduct an experiment as part of a group project in my consumer behavior class. Not only did Lily conceive a novel experimental idea, she also hypothesized that it would elicit a rather counter-intuitive result. We designed a mathematical version of her hypothesis and it was the single best predictor of human choice behavior in her task. Lily presented both of these projects at the ACU Undergraduate Research Festival, and the former at a regional psychology conference. Moreover, we are in the process of writing both of these projects up for publications in scholarly peer review journals. This was Lily’s second year to have multiple presentations at the ACU Undergraduate Research Festival together with a presentation at a regional conference; these other presentations involved research with faculty members from the ACU Psychology Department.