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The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would "push" the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Data collected from a quick-serve sandwich chain over one year provide an opportunity to study market, sociographic, meteorologic, and other factors impacting sales and sales forecasting. The weekly sales table contains over 79,000 rows which each represent summary statistics for the sales of an individual menu item in one store during one week of the year. The data were collected from the point-of-sale system of 10 stores. Secondary data regarding weather patterns, population, location, competition, and crime statistics were gathered and integrated with the original data set.