Karlo Doroc
Interdisciplinary researcher on human decision-making, looking for academic positions.
Interdisciplinary researcher on human decision-making, looking for academic positions.
I'm Karlo, a PhD Candidate in Decision, Risk, and Financial Sciences with the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets (CBMM) at the University of Melbourne. I work under the supervision of Carsten Murawski, Nitin Yadav, and Peter Bossaerts.
Using laboratory and online experiments, I focus on how the structure of task environments and the cognitive capacities of individuals affect people's ability to solve problems and make good decisions. Drawing from cognitive science, experimental economics, and computational complexity theory, I study how the cognitive resources available to a person interact with the computational resource requirements of the problem at hand to shape decision-making.
Prior to my PhD, I obtained a Master's degree in Decision, Risk, and Financial Sciences, and a Bachelor's degree in Commerce (Economics and Finance) with an Honours year (Finance) - all from the University of Melbourne. I also worked in the financial industry for 7 years with PwC and Link Group (superannuation / pension fund administrator).
Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Murawski, C. (2025). Complex decision-making under stress: shallower search and impaired decision quality at different levels of computational hardness. Communications Psychology.
Key finding: People have reduced decision quality in the knapsack task (a complex budgeting task) when under acute stress. Exploratory behavioural and gaze tracking analyses revealed that this impairment under stress only occurs alongside time pressure, when the maximum available time is used on a trial, and that it's accompanied by a shallower pattern of information search. Read more...
Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Pike, K., Murawski, C., Franco, J.P. (2025). Cognitive decline, not age, explains reduced decision-making capacity in healthy older adults. Preprint: PsyArXiv.
Key finding: Healthy older adults have significantly reduced decision quality in the knapsack task (a complex task that can model budgeting and time management), relative to younger adults. This effect appears to be explained by deficits in basic cognitive abilities, such as working memory, set shifting, and processing speed, and not age, education, motivation, or affect. Surprisingly, the largest differences in decision quality between age groups occurred on trials with lower computational demands. Read more...
Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Murawski, C. (2024). Acute stress impairs performance in a computationally hard cognitive task. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.
Key finding: People take more time and have reduced decision quality in the knapsack task (a complex task that can model behaviours like budgeting and time management) when under acute stress. This behaviour was independent of task difficulty, as people did equally worse under stress on easier and harder cases of the task. Read more...
Cite: Franco, J.P., Doroc, K., Yadav, N. et al. Task-independent metrics of computational hardness predict human cognitive performance. Sci Rep 12, 12914 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16565-w
Key finding: Generic measures of how hard instances of the Knapsack problem (a budgeting task) are, drawn from computational complexity theory, generalise to predict human performance on the Travelling Salesperson (a spatial navigation task) and the 3-satisfiability (an abstract logic task) problems. Read more...
Click the images to view the slides/posters.
Foundations of FinTech (UG and PG; 2019-2020, 2022-2023)
Content: Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, portfolio optimisation, python, jupyter notebooks, risk elicitation mechanisms
Role: Head Tutor
Introductory Personal Finance (UG; 2017, 2021)
Content: Budgeting, taxation, investments, superannuation / pension funds
Role: Head Tutor and Guest Lecturer
Machine Learning in Finance (PG; 2025)
Content: Asset pricing, machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, portfolio optimisation, python, jupyter notebooks
Role: Tutor
Foundations of Business Analytics (UG; 2025)
Content: Business analysis, R, data visualisation, data wrangling, data analysis
Role: Tutor
Principles of Finance (UG; 2023-2025)
Content: Discounted cash flows, debt and equity securities, capital budgeting, capital structure
Role: Tutor
Investments (UG; 2021-2022)
Content: Financial markets, portfolio theory, CAPM, fixed income portfolios, derivative securities
Role: Tutor