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Name of Speaker
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Yael Grushka-Cockayne |
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Schedule
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27 Mar 2026, 10am – 11.30am (60 min talk + 30 min Q&A) |
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Venue
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HSS 4-2
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| Link to register
(via Zoom) |
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Title
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Decision-making with Ordinal Ratings
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Abstract
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Experts often provide judgments on an ordinal scale, which are easy to generate and are intuitive. Ordinal ratings, however, are not trivial to aggregate across multiple experts, as they provide neither the strict preference ordering of a ranking, nor the intensity of preference of cardinal scores. In addition, ordinal rating judgments often map to a broad set of outcomes, which are not expressed through the ordinal, discrete set of choices elicited. In this way, ordinal ratings also neglect to express the degree of uncertainty that may exist when rankings are interpreted as forecasts. We offer a framework for mapping ordinal ratings to continuous outcome distributions, allowing for the aggregation of ratings and the expression of the uncertainty that may exist in the forecasts. Finally, our framework allows for rendering the aggregate distributional forecasts back to the original ordinal scale, providing again an intuitive set of judgements, to be used by the decision maker. We demonstrate our framework in the context of National Football League (NFL) scout assessments of players performance. These assessments, treated as forecasts, are utilized by general managers when making player selection decisions in the annual NFL draft.
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About the Speaker
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Yael Grushka-Cockayne Landmark Communication Incorporated Professor of Business Administration, Vice Dean and Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs, Academic Co-Director of the LaCross Institute for AI.
Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s research and teaching activities focus on data science, artificial intelligence, forecasting, project management and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences in the areas of decision analysis, project management and management science. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne is an award-winning teacher, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia’s Mead-Colley Award in 2012, the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022, University of Virginia All University Teaching Award in 2015, the Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018, and the Transformational Faculty Award in 2024. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne teaches the core “Decision Analysis” course, an elective she designed on project management, an elective on data science and a new course on coding with ChatGPT. Before starting her academic career, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company. As an expert in the areas of project management, Prof. Grushka-Cockayne has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. She is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS, the President of the Decision Analysis Society, and a member of the Operational Research Society and the Project Management Institute (PMI). She served an associate editor at Management Science and is currently as associate editor at Operation Research. Grushka-Cockayne was named one of “21 Thought-Leader Professors” in Data Science. Her course “Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management” Coursera MOOC has over 300,000 enrolled, across 200 countries worldwide. Her “Data Science for Business” Harvard Online course, launched in 2021, has taught hundreds of learners around the world. |
