Search results for "decision"

Between-group competition and human cooperation.

2008

A distinctive feature of human behaviour is the widespread occurrence of cooperation among unrelated individuals. Explaining the maintenance of costly within-group cooperation is a challenge because the incentive to free ride on the efforts of other group members is expected to lead to decay of cooperation. However, the costs of cooperation can be diminished or overcome when there is competition at a higher level of organizational hierarchy. Here we show that competition between groups resolves the paradigmatic ‘public goods’ social dilemma and increases within-group cooperation and overall productivity. Further, group competition intensifies the moral emotions of anger and guilt associated…

Cooperative spectrum sensing schemes for future dynamic spectrum access infrastructures

2016

Electronic Patient Records in Interprofessional Decision Making: Standardized Categories and Local Use

2012

Electronic patient records (EPRs) are a constitutive element of medical practice and are expected to improve interprofessional communication and support decision making. The aim of the current study is to explore the ways in which access to structured information from multiple professions within EPRs enters into the phases involved in arriving at final agreements about patients’ future care. The results show that decision making in interprofessional team rounds involves a prestructuring of a pathological reality. Further, the results demonstrate how information in EPRs is deconstructed and recast into patterns that presuppose knowledge about the EPR’s structural organization. This means tha…

Using uncertain preferential information from stakeholders to assess the acceptability of alternative forest management plans

2017

In forest management planning, participatory planning processes are often encouraged as a means to acquire relevant information and to enhance the stakeholders' acceptability of alternative plans. This requires the aggregation of the stakeholders' preferences that can be done in a wide variety of manners. The aggregation process strives to reduce the information into a single set of preferences that simplifies the information and allows for the use of discrete decision support tools. Depending on how the preferences are aggregated, a wide range of plan rankings can emerge. Although this range of ranking complicates the issue of plan selection, it does highlight the uncertainty involved in a…

Effects of contextual variables on strategic investment decision-making styles: An empirical study from Pakistan.

2022

There is a gap in the literature of strategic investment decision making (SIDM) concerning the links between context variables, infrastructure and SIDM practices (or SIDM styles) in developing countries. This research aims to fill that gap. Survey data (N = 128) from the manufacturing companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange was collected via an e-mailed questionnaire and visits to the companies. Data are analyzed with factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. The results reveal what we call four different SIDM styles (or emphases): managerial power-, financial analysis-, top management-, and strategy-based investing. These styles are considered to be novel perspectives on SI…

Governing at the frontier of the European Commission : the case of seconded national officials

2005

Studies of executive institutions have largely dealt separately with national and international executive institutions (IEIs). This study unpacks and repacks four conflicting decision-making dynamics that unfolds at the frontier of IEIs – that is, at the institutional rim where national and international executive institutions meet, interact and collide. The empirical laboratory utilised is seconded national experts in the European Commission. The survey and interview data presented demonstrates that the decision-making behaviour of seconded national experts includes a mix of departmental (portfolio), epistemic (expert) and supranational behaviour. The suspicion early voiced by Coombes (197…

DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABLE METROPOLITAN AREAS USING A MULTI-SCALE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

2012

A sustainable and sustaining planning strategy is globally important for metropolitan areas. Sustainable planning addresses the development of strategies to reduce the use of resources, increase economic efficiency and improve integration of social aspects. In contrast, splinter development (e.g. urban sprawl) involves damage to nature and generation of an increasing volume of traffic (these are the main criticisms following a study by Newman and Kenworthy (1989) on the relationship between settlement density and energy consumption). Interestingly, the overly compact city also has this effect as it may generate traffic flows for accessing green and leisure areas, or changes of residence due…

A System Dynamics approach to improve clinical risk management effectiveness in an italian hospital ward: a case study.

Wastewater treatment: New insight provided by interactive multiobjective optimization

2011

In this paper, we describe a new interactive tool developed for wastewater treatment plant design. The tool is aimed at supporting the designer in designing new wastewater treatment plants as well as optimizing the performance of already available plants. The idea is to utilize interactive multiobjective optimization which enables the designer to consider the design with respect to several conflicting evaluation criteria simultaneously. This is more important than ever because the requirements for wastewater treatment plants are getting tighter and tighter from both environmental and economical reasons. By combining a process simulator to simulate wastewater treatment and an interactive mul…

E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method

2015

Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…