Discussion: View Thread

When to Pivot — and How to Know: Learning Under Uncertainty

How do decision-makers learn about themselves, about others, about the business landscape, about the social environment? Six contributions — rarely in the same room.

Chair: Sheen S. Levine (UT Dallas & Columbia) · Discussant: Henning Piezunka (U. Penn.)

Speakers: Arnaldo Camuffo (Bocconi) Spencer Caplan (CUNY) Douglas Guilbeault (Stanford) Moritz Janas (Gothenburg) Nikos Nikiforakis (NYU Abu Dhabi) Hart E. Posen (Dartmouth) Christoph Riedl (Northeastern) Daniel Schliesmann (U. Penn.) Simon Siegenthaler (UT Dallas & NBER) Yue Ling Sima (UT Dallas) Charles Yang (U. Penn.)

These questions are studied in separate literatures — reinforcement learning and aspirations in one, social thresholds and tipping points in another, theory-based strategy and governance in a third — and they rarely speak to one another. This symposium brings them into the same room.

Six contributions span analytical and computational models, agent-based simulations, and large-scale incentivized experiments to ask a single, integrated question: how should actors encode feedback, structure experiments, and allocate attention so that learning is both effective and strategically aligned?

If you care about how people, boards, and societies navigate uncertainty — and how they decide when to pivot — this is the session.

📅 Sun Aug 2 · 11:30–13:00 · Sheraton, Liberty Ballroom D 🔗 All sessions → https://l.sslevine.com/AoM2026