Neural and psychological maturation of decision-making in adolescence and young adulthood

We examined the maturation of decision-making from early adolescence to mid-adulthood using fMRI of a variant of the Iowa gambling task. We have previously shown that performance in this task relies on sensitivity to accumulating negative outcomes in ventromedial PFC and dorsolateral PFC. Here, we further formalize outcome evaluation (as driven by prediction errors [PE], using a reinforcement learning model) and examine its development. Task performance improved significantly during adolescence, stabilizing in adulthood. Performance relied on greater impact of negative compared with positive PEs, the relative impact of which matured from adolescence into adulthood. Adolescents also showed increased exploratory behavior, expressed as a propensity to shift responding between options independently of outcome quality, whereas adults showed no systematic shifting patterns. The correlation between PE representation and improved performance strengthened with age for activation in ventral and dorsal PFC, ventral striatum, and temporal and parietal cortices. There was a medial-lateral distinction in the prefrontal substrates of effective PE utilization between adults and adolescents: Increased utilization of negative PEs, a hallmark of successful performance in the task, was associated with increased activation in ventromedial PFC in adults, but decreased activation in ventrolateral PFC and striatum in adolescents. These results suggest that adults and adolescents engage qualitatively distinct neural and psychological processes during decision-making, the development of which is not exclusively dependent on reward-processing maturation.

Incorporating semiotics into fuzzy logic to enhance Clinical Decision Support Systems

In order to enhance the quality of care, healthcare organisations are increasingly resorting to clinical decision support systems (CDSSs), which provide physicians with appropriate health care decisions or recommendations. However, how to explicitly represent the diverse vague medical knowledge and effectively reason in the decision-making process are still problems we are confronted. In this paper, we incorporate semiotics into fuzzy logic to enhance CDSSs with the aim of providing both the abilities of describing medical domain concepts contextually and reasoning with vague knowledge. A semiotically inspired fuzzy CDSSs framework is presented, based on which the vague knowledge representation and reasoning process are demonstrated.

Present simple and continuous: emergence of self-regulation and contextual sophistication in adolescent decision-making

Sophisticated, intentional decision-making is a hallmark of mature, self-aware behaviour. Although neural, psychological, interpersonal, and socioeconomic elements that contribute to such adaptive, foresighted behaviour mature and/or change throughout the life-span, here we concentrate on relevant maturational processes that take place during adolescence, a period of disproportionate developmental opportunity and risk. A brief, eclectic overview is presented of recent evidence, new challenges, and current thinking on the fundamental mechanisms that mature throughout adolescence to support adaptive, self-controlled decision-making. This is followed by a proposal for the putative contribution of frontostriatal mechanisms to the moment-to-moment assembly of evaluative heuristics that mediate increased decision-making sophistication, promoting the maturation of self-regulated behaviour through adolescence and young adulthood.

GM food purchase intentions: linking the theory of planned behaviour with consumer trust and stated choice

After the “European” experience of BSE and further food safety crises consumer trust is playing an increasingly important role in political and marketing decision making. This also relates to the area of consumer acceptance of GM food. This paper integrates consumer trust with the theory of planned behavior and a stated choice model to gain a more complete picture of consumer decision making. Preliminary results indicate that when GM products offer practical benefits to consumers acceptance may increase considerably. Furthermore, both trust and perceived benefits contribute significantly to explaining the level of acceptance.

Multi-attribute collaborative filtering recommendation based on improved group decision-making

Currently researchers in the field of personalized recommendations bear little consideration on users' interest differences in resource attributes although resource attribute is usually one of the most important factors in determining user preferences. To solve this problem, the paper builds an evaluation model of user interest based on resource multi-attributes, proposes a modified Pearson-Compatibility multi-attribute group decision-making algorithm, and introduces an algorithm to solve the recommendation problem of k-neighbor similar users. Considering the characteristics of collaborative filtering recommendation, the paper addresses the issues on the preference differences of similar users, incomplete values, and advanced converge of the algorithm. Thus the paper realizes multi-attribute collaborative filtering. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is proved by an experiment of collaborative recommendation among multi-users based on virtual environment. The experimental results show that the algorithm has a high accuracy on predicting target users' attribute preferences and has a strong anti-interference ability on deviation and incomplete values.

Responsibility effects in decision making under risk

We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. This is however not attributable to a 'cautious shift' as often thought. Indeed, looking at risk attitudes in the loss domain, we find an increase in risk seeking under responsibility. This raises issues about the nature of various decision biases under risk, and to what extent changed behavior under responsibility may depend on a social norm of caution in situations of responsibility versus naive corrections from perceived biases. To further explore this issue, we designed a second experiment to explore risk-taking behavior for gain prospects offering very small or very large probabilities of winning. For large probabilities, we find increased risk aversion, thus confirming our earlier finding. For small probabilities however, we find an increase of risk seeking under conditions of responsibility. The latter finding thus discredits hypotheses of a social rule dictating caution under responsibility, and can be explained through flexible self-correction models predicting an accentuation of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes predicted by prospect theory. An additional accountability mechanism does not change risk behavior, except for mixed prospects, in which it reduces loss aversion. This indicates that loss aversion is of a fundamentally different nature than probability weighting or utility curvature. Implications for debiasing are discussed.

Willingness-to-pay for a probabilistic flood forecast: a risk-based decision-making game

Probabilistic hydro-meteorological forecasts have over the last decades been used more frequently to communicate forecastuncertainty. This uncertainty is twofold, as it constitutes both an added value and a challenge for the forecaster and the user of the forecasts. Many authors have demonstrated the added (economic) value of probabilistic over deterministic forecasts across the water sector (e.g. flood protection, hydroelectric power management and navigation). However, the richness of the information is also a source of challenges for operational uses, due partially to the difficulty to transform the probability of occurrence of an event into a binary decision. This paper presents the results of a risk-based decision-making game on the topic of flood protection mitigation, called “How much are you prepared to pay for a forecast?”. The game was played at several workshops in 2015, which were attended by operational forecasters and academics working in the field of hydrometeorology. The aim of this game was to better understand the role of probabilistic forecasts in decision-making processes and their perceived value by decision-makers. Based on the participants’ willingness-to-pay for a forecast, the results of the game show that the value (or the usefulness) of a forecast depends on several factors, including the way users perceive the quality of their forecasts and link it to the perception of their own performances as decision-makers.

Stress, time pressure, and decision making

This study surveys parents with children who are deaf or hard of hearing from one private school in St. Louis, Missouri. The issue of stress and time pressure on decision making is addressed and the importance of how stress and time pressure effect parents’ decisions regarding their children who are deaf and hard of hearing.

A adaptação do Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire (MDMQ) para a área de administração no Brasil

Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-graduação em Administração - Mestrado da Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul

Abordagem da análise conjunta no processo decisório de compra do serviço de academia de ginástica

The wellness, physical activity and health club market is in great expansion and grownth in the national and worldwide cenarium. In a growing competitive environment, the prediction of of consumer preferences over a product, for its innumerous attributes, is a critical aspect for any marketing administration. Determining customer perception of value in the form of utilities can provide the marketing administration of a company with a functional tool to evaluate the usefulness of a product or service. This thesis investigates the motivational attributes of decision making process when choosing a health club / gym center service. Data was collected through a web survey with 376 participants from Rio de Janeiro and Distrito Federal. The data was analysed through the conjoint analysis method. Resultados demonstraram que as importâncias relativas dos atributos ¿estrutura física¿ e ¿atendimento¿ obtiveram valores maiores do que os demais atributos testados. O atributo ¿preço¿ foi o terceiro em grau de importância, seguido de ¿proximidade¿ e ¿indicação¿. Results demonstrated that the relative values of the attribute regarding ¿gym facilities¿ and ¿attendance¿ obtained greater values than the other tested attributes. The ¿price¿ attribute was the third degree in the scale of value, followed by ¿proximity¿ and ¿indication¿.

Abordagem da análise conjunta no processo decisório de aquisição do serviço de academia de ginástica

The wellness, physical activity and health club market is in great expansion and grownth in the national and worldwide cenarium. In a growing competitive environment, the prediction of of consumer preferences over a product, for its innumerous attributes, is a critical aspect for any marketing administration. Determining customer perception of value in the form of utilities can provide the marketing administration of a company with a functional tool to evaluate the usefulness of a product or service. This thesis investigates the motivational attributes of decision making process when choosing a health club / gym center service. Data was collected through a web survey with 376 participants from Rio de Janeiro and Distrito Federal. The data was analysed through the conjoint analysis method. Results demonstrated that the relative values of the attribute regarding ¿gym facilities¿ and ¿attendance¿ obtained greater values than the other tested attributes. The ¿price¿ attribute was the third degree in the scale of value, followed by ¿proximity¿ and ¿indication¿.

Aplicação de metodologia de preços hedônicos ao mercado brasileiro de serviços de comunicação e mídia

O Brasil possui um dos mercados de serviços de comunicação e mídia que mais cresce no mundo. Grande parte deste crescimento pode ser atribuída à evolução tecnológica e às recentes alterações no ambiente competitivo, os quais favoreceram a convergência de serviços antes vendidos separadamente - voz, dados e TV. Isto elevou a atratividade destes serviços, contribuindo também para a redução de seu preço, por meio, principalmente, dos ganhos de escala, impulsionando seu crescimento. Este crescimento atraiu mais competidores ao mercado, o que, intensificado por mudanças regulatórias, eleva a importância da correta precificação dos pacotes de serviços. Portanto, um entendimento apropriado dos atributos mais valorizados pelos consumidores no processo decisório de compra destes serviços é de fundamental importância para melhorar a alocação dos recursos e maximizar o retorno, sem perda de participação de mercado. Este trabalho aplica a Metodologia de Preços Hedônicos como ferramenta para auxiliar na identificação dos atributos relevantes dos pacotes de serviços multimídia comercializados no mercado da cidade de São Paulo e seus respectivos preços implícitos. São 371 pacotes distintos contendo de um a três tipos diferentes de serviços analisados com base nos preços praticados em março de 2009. Como resultado, foram identificados intensos prêmios de preço associados aos canais do grupo Telecine, aos canais esportivos, infantis e de filmes e séries, bem como às variáveis ligadas às velocidades de download e upload.

A confusão no processo de escolha do consumidor

Dentro da literatura de Comportamento do Consumidor e Teoria da Decisão existe considerável corpo teórico que analisa sentimentos negativos e reações adversas no processo decisório de compras de produtos de alto e baixo envolvimento. Vários fenômenos são identificados como negativos no processo, principalmente a Confusão do Consumidor, que compreende três dimensões: i) muitas informações similares sobre produtos, ii) muitas informações sobre diferentes produtos e iii) informações falsas e ambíguas. Tal fenômeno, no entanto, parece ser moderado por um conjunto de variáveis, como o Envolvimento, a Experiência e a Restrição de Tempo (moderadoras da relação entre Confusão do Consumidor e Intenção de Compra). Este fato foi identificado através de entrevistas em profundidade. Os resultados das entrevistas permitiram identificar as variáveis moderadoras, assim como a existência do fenômeno e sua relação com a decisão final de compra. Na segunda fase da pesquisa, supõe-se que indivíduos com baixo Envolvimento e Restrição de Tempo possuam uma propensão maior à confusão. No Estudo 2 foram utilizados como moderadores o Envolvimento e a Restrição de Tempo, ambos manipulados por instrução, sendo as variáveis dependentes a Intenção de Compra e a Confusão do Consumidor. Os resultados do Estudo 2 permitiram inferir que existem diferenças significativas entre os grupos, quando analisada a variável Confusão do Consumidor, mas, em alguns grupos, a Intenção de Compra não era significativamente diferente. No Estudo 3 foram manipuladas a Experiência (forte e fraca) e a Confusão do Consumidor, sendo a variável dependente a Intenção de Compra. Os resultados do Estudo 3 também permitiram inferir que existem diferenças significativas entre os grupos na Intenção de compra, quando consideradas baixa ou alta confusão, assim como Experiência forte ou fraca. Na última fase da pesquisa foram destacadas as estratégias dos consumidores para lidar com o fenômeno Confusão do Consumidor. Tais estratégias, muitas vezes, são mediadoras de comportamentos posteriores, como a compra do produto. No Estudo 4 manipulou-se a Confusão do Consumidor em duas de suas dimensões. Foi possível destacar a preponderância da estratégia por busca de informações e postergação da decisão, quando o consumidor se depara com situações confusas.