Ian Durbach

Biography

I did a Business Science degree in quantitative management at UCT and continued into the master's program in 2001. I completed the degree in 2003; my thesis was on “the treatment of uncertainty in multi-criteria decision modelling”. After that I worked for 18 months as a statistician at the Customer Equity Company, a market research company in Cape Town. I returned to UCT in 2005 on a one-year contract; this position was made permanent in 2006. Since then I have mostly convened and lectured on two third-year level statistics courses, one in applied multivariate statistics and the other in inferential statistics, and lectured on the decision modelling module in the honours program. I'm a member of the Operational Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA) and currently sit on the executive committee. My research has remained on decision making under uncertainty; my PhD thesis is entitled “Simplified models for multi-criteria decision analysis under uncertainty”.

Research Interest

My research investigates prescriptive and descriptive processes underlying risky or uncertain choice i.e. helping or describing decision makers choosing between options whose outcomes are uncertain. I have a special interest in the boundary between prescriptive and descriptive models, and in simplified or heuristic approaches to the problem. In the last year or two I've become more involved in applied statistical problems, mostly in the fields of energy and marketing/consumer behaviour.