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Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is a widely used approach for measuring speech pattern stability across multiple repetitions of a stimulus. In this study, we examine how methodological choices in the implementation of the STI (including the number of repetitions, length of stimuli, and parsing procedure) can affect its value. Method: To evaluate how each methodological decision affects the STI, we use a synthetic data framework that allows for the generation of random productions of the template phrase 'Buy Bobby a Puppy' at different stability levels. Within this framework, we conduct three experiments: Experiment 1 investigates the effects of the number of repetitions, Experiment 2 investigates the effects of stimulus length, and Experiment 3 investigates the effects of parsing errors. Results: In Experiment 1, we observed that STI values based on fewer repetitions will systematically underestimate larger repetition estimates. Experiment 2 showed that STI values will tend to be higher when calculated on longer (multimovement) stimuli independent of any differences in the stability of the underlying speech patterns. Finally, in Experiment 3, we showed that even minor parsing errors ([approximately equal to] 10 ms) increase the value of the STI. Conclusions: The results of this study illustrate that even minor choices in the implementation of the STI can have a noticeable impact on the resulting value. These findings highlight the care that needs to be taken when designing studies and comparing STI values across studies to ensure that different STI values are capturing real differences in motion pattern stability rather than trivial methodological variation., The spatiotemporal index (STI) is a measure of movement pattern stability exhibited over repeated performance of the same motor task (such as speech production). By incorporating repeated utterances across the [...]

Drawing from stewardship theory, we investigated corporate entrepreneurship in family firms. We argued that stewardship culture determinants--comprehensive strategic decision making, participative governance, long-term orientation, and human capital--differentiate the most entrepreneurial [...]

We present a general equilibrium model of the response of firms' decisions to operate, innovate, and engage in international trade to a change in the marginal cost of international trade. We find that, although a change in trade costs can have a substantial impact on heterogeneous firms' exit, export, and process innovation decisions, the impact of changes in these decisions on welfare is largely offset by the response of product innovation. Our results suggest that microeconomic evidence on firms' responses to changes in international trade costs may not be informative about the implications of changes in these trade costs for aggregate welfare.

Experiments were conducted to determine the effect of deliberation on the preference consistency of consumers. It was hypothesized that deliberation leads to the inconsistent weighing of information. Findings indicate that the extent to which deliberation decreases preference consistency depends upon the complexity of information.

The effects of the regulatory orientation and decision making strategies of consumers on brand judgments are studied. These judgments are influenced by feelings on the processing of information independent of the message content.

The study hypothesizes that sleep deprivation has a negative monotonic, although nonlinear, effect on a team's decision-making accuracy and problem solving ability. It is then proposed that task, structural and social factors intensify or lessen the effect of sleep deprivation on decision-making accuracy and problem-solving ability.

Much of the debate over the underlying causes of discrimination centers on file rationality of employer decision making. Economic models of statistical discrimination emphasize the cognitive utility of group estimates as a means of dealing with the problems of uncertainty. Sociological and social-psychological models, by contrast, question the accuracy of group-level attributions. Although mean differences may exist between groups on productivity-related characteristics, these differences are often inflated in their application, leading to much larger differences in individual evaluations than would be warranted by actual group-level trait distributions. In this study, the authors examine the nature of employer attitudes about black and white workers and the extent to which these views are calibrated against their direct experiences with workers from each group. They use data from fifty-five in-depth interviews with hiring managers to explore employers' group-level attributions and their direct observations to develop a model of attitude formation and employer learning. Keywords: racial discrimination; employment; employer interviews; African Americans; stereotypes

It is well established in the literature that people are active decision makers in relation to help seeking and medicine taking. This paper uses data from two qualitative studies that focused on mood-modifying medicines to illustrate how active engagement, demonstrated through help seeking and decisions about treatment, was perceived to be a crucial part of recovery. Data were generated from semi-structured interviews with 23 men and women in the UK and 12 women in Denmark. We argue that being active in decisions relating to help seeking and medicine taking for problems with mood is perceived as central in order to (re)find an 'authentic' sense of self. There is, however, an inherent contradiction in the fact that the majority of the respondents believed medicine taking to be necessary, yet the act of taking a mood-modifying medicine was in most cases perceived as a potential threat to agency and ultimately the achievement of an authentic self. Keywords: UK; Denmark; Agency; Help seeking; Medicine taking decisions; Mood-modifying medicines

A sequential risk-taking paradigm used to identify real-world risk takers invokes both learning and decision processes. This article expands the paradigm to a larger class of tasks with different stochastic environments and different learning requirements. Generalizing a Bayesian sequential risk-taking model to the larger set of tasks clarifies the roles of learning and decision making during sequential risky choice. Results show that respondents adapt their learning processes and associated mental representations of the task to the stochastic environment. Furthermore, their Bayesian learning processes are shown to interfere with the paradigm's identification of risky drug use, whereas the decision-making process facilitates its diagnosticity. Theoretical implications of the results in terms of both understanding risk-taking behavior and improving risk-taking assessment methods are discussed. Keywords: risk taking, learning, Bayesian, individual differences, cognitive psychometrics

It is shown how factors that are unique to an organizational level can interact with the individual-level tendencies by means of prospect theory and organization--level behavioral theory. It was noticed that divestitute decisions were influenced by both individual and organization level factors.

The relation between affective experience and decision-making performance is studied.

A study is conducted to determine whether provider availability and legal restrictions affect the abortion decision of young women. Results suggest that the legal restrictions have no significant impact on abortion decision of young women, but the number of per capita abortion providers affect their decision to abort a fetus.

Humans and animals learn from experience by reducing the probability of sampling alternatives with poor past outcomes. Using simulations, J. G. March (1996) illustrated how such adaptive sampling could lead to risk-averse as well as risk-seeking behavior. In this article, the author develops a formal theory of how adaptive sampling influences risk taking. He shows that a risk-neutral decision maker may learn to prefer a sure thing to an uncertain alternative with identical expected value and a symmetric distribution, even if the decision maker follows an optimal policy of learning. If the distribution of the uncertain alternative is negatively skewed, risk-seeking behavior can emerge. Consistent with recent experiments, the model implies that information about foregone payoffs increases risk taking. Keywords: decisions from experience, risk taking, decisions under uncertainty, adaptive behavior, learning from outcome feedback

A study on individual decision making to protect wealth and property and its influence on social life is discussed.

The expansion of stock misperception into spatial and non-spatial components to analyze decision making in patchy resource environments, using bioeconomic models, is presented.

Influence of mental accounting on consumer credit decision making is examined.

The decision-making behavior of seconded national experts in the European commission includes a mix of departmental, epistemic and supranational behavior is presented. It is found that the decision-making behavior evoked by seconded national officials in the commission is strongly affected by organizational characteristics of the commission itself and less by the member-state administrations from which the secondees originate.

This article examines the role of TV coverage in voter decision making during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign, called just weeks after a major asylum seeker incident and the September 11 terrorist attacks. It does so by exploring voters' differential reliance on two distinct, high profile sets of issues that dominated media election campaign coverage: the domestic issues that had been the focus throughout the election year (especially health, education, and taxes) and the international issues that assumed centre stage just before the election was called (refugees and asylum seekers, terrorism, and defence and national security). Using an original content analysis of TV coverage and the 2001 Australian election survey, interaction effects models yield significantly different patterns of reliance on international and domestic for groups of voters. These effects are distinguished by the timing of individuals' vote choice, and the level of their existing political interest and information. Moderately interested voters, who largely decided their vote choice about the time the election was called, were the most likely to cite international issues as the key to their vote choice. Voters with lower levels of political interest, deciding just before or on election day, were significantly more reliant on domestic issues. These patterns represent a variant on Zaller's (1989) model of campaign information flow, and suggest a single, high-intensity campaign--especially in Australia's compulsory voting system, which forces the participation of the country's least interested and informed individuals--can sustain within it two distinct issue agendas which voters with different cognitive skills and responsiveness to TV cues differentially utilize to inform their vote choice.

The potential prejudicial impact of graphic evidence of violence (GEV) on juror decision-making has evoked concerns for defendants' due process rights. One hundred and twenty eight student mock jurors were [...]

When dealing with many-objectives optimization problems, the concepts of Pareto-optimality and Pareto-dominance are often inefficient in modeling and simulating human decision making. This leads to an unpractical size for the set of Pareto-optimal (PO) solutions, and an additional selection criteria among solutions is usually arbitrarily considered. In the paper, different fuzzy-based definitions of optimality and dominated solutions, being nonpreference based, are introduced and tested on analytical test cases, in order to show their validity and nearness to human decision making. Based on this definitions, different subsets of PO solution set can be computed using simple and clear information provided by the decision maker and using a parameter value ranging from zero to one. When the value of the above parameter is zero, the introduced definitions coincide with classical Pareto-optimality and dominance. When the parameter value is increased, different subset of PO solutions can be obtained corresponding to higher degrees of optimality. Index Terms--Design problems with several criteria, fuzzy optimality definition, multiobjective optimization, limitations of Pareto-optimality.

Influence diagrams have been important models for decision problems because of their ability to both model a problem rigorously at its mathematical level and depict its high-level structure graphically. Once the structure and numerical details of an influence diagram have been specified, it can be evaluated to determine the optimal decision policy. However, when evaluating multiple objectives, in the past this determination was based on the assumption that utility functions that commensurate the objectives are available. This paper extends the structure and solution algorithm for influence diagrams to allow for the inclusion of noncommensurate objectives using multiobjective tradeoff analysis instead of utility theory. This eliminates the need to specify any preference information before the influence diagram is solved. The proposed multiobjective-based methodology is also useful for decisionmakers who either do not want to accept the assumptions of utility theory for a particular problem, or are confronted with a problem in which it is neither practical nor viable to construct a utility function. Additionally, this paper establishes the relationship between multiobjective influence diagrams and multiobjective decision trees. This relationship is important because it allows a decisionmaker to utilize the advantages of both representations. An example problem is presented to introduce both the extended multiobjective influence diagram methodology and the relationship linking multiobjective decision trees to multiobjective influence diagrams. Index Terms--Decision trees, influence diagrams, multiple objectives, risk analysis.

The present study examined the assumption that non-anonymous choices in social dilemmas (i.e., choices for which one is accountable) may influence cooperation, but only to the extent that decision-makers believe that the others will evaluate non-cooperation negatively. Based on a recent review by Kerr (1999), it was expected that under conditions of accountability, decision-makers would cooperate more when they believed that the others within the group were also concerned about their social reputation and therefore were aware of the social norm of cooperation within social dilemmas. As a consequence, it could be expected that non-cooperation by oneself would be evaluated negatively by those others since they seemed to be aware of what ought to be done in a social dilemma (i.e., the norm of cooperation). Results confirmed these predictions and, in addition, also showed that greater willingness to cooperate was associated with stronger feelings of collective concern. The findings are discussed in terms of recent literature on anonymity effects in social dilemmas.

The tension between allocative efficiency and information aggregation is explored in the context of an auction: k identical objects of unknown quality are auctioned off to n bidders whose tastes affect their valuation of an object of given quality. Bidders receive a signal about the quality of the objects. The k highest bidders get an object and pay a price equal to the k + 1st highest bid. We find conditions under which, in the limit, objects are allocated efficiently to those with the highest tastes, and price converges in probability to the value of an object to the marginal taste type.

This study investigated if prior discussion of values by competent older women (N = 60) with their proxies assisted these proxies to make critical health care decisions in congruence with the desires of the women. Women were randomly assigned to experimental or control groups. Experimental treatment consisted of discussion of value indicators in the presence of their proxies. The proxies were instructed to make decisions in 10 situations across 3 mental states using the substituted judgment standard. The experimental group did not have statistically higher agreement than women-proxy pairs in the control group in 27 of the 30 situations, but they had greater percentage agreement in 11 of the situations. Limitations of the Kappa statistic in health care agreement studies were addressed. The mean treatment decision scores were significantly different across mental states, indicating as mental acuity was decreased in the scenarios, the women were more likely to refuse the recommended treatment.