scholarly journals Bayes’ Theorem as a Tool for Better Administration of Employee Discretion

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-57
Author(s):  
Mirko Pečarič

This paper presents a new form of discretion that deals with subliminal (personal) preferences, which are present in discretionary decision-making (where the mental, cognitive functions of public servants, mixed with their character and “dressed” with sophistic, logically well-explained and legally allowed reasons are present). This paper presents employee discretion that could be a denominator of the public employees’ will to do or not to do something, to give lesser or greater weight to something. The power to choose is hence not only possible in legal frameworks but also outside of them. So far, informal power has been viewed in the law as the illegal one, although there are many informal, especially personal elements involved in the legal decision-making that are never brought to light. This paper offers a promising approach to how decisions can be similar in similar matters, despite their differences in personal backgrounds, cognitive capabilities or emotional variances. This can be done if Bayes’ theorem is used. Probability can here be established based on how much we believe something after we have seen the evidence; this depends not only on what the evidence shows but also on our pre-existing preferences (pre-investigation, prior probability or just a prior) or weights that affect our view on evidence or how much we believed in the evidence from the start. By assessing priors, decision-makers can become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty, and at the same time, the “echo chambers” of unfounded claims can be avoided. This way, subjective preferences could be known to others, while the principles of equality and equity could be raised to a higher level. Further development of employee discretion is based on the same grounds as this type of discretion – on our personal (in)actions.

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khalifa Al-Farsi ◽  
Ramzi EL Haddadeh

Information technology governance is considered one of the innovative practices that can provide support for decision-makers. Interestingly, it has become increasingly a de facto for organizations in seeking to optimise their performance. In principle, information technology governance has emerged to support organizations in the integration of information technology (IT) infrastructures and the delivery of high-quality services. On the other hand, decision-making processes in public sector organisations can be multi-faceted and complex, and decision makers play an important role in implementing technology in the public sector. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on current opportunities and challenges that IT governance is experiencing in the context of public sector services. In this respect, this paper examines the factors influencing the decision-making process to fully appreciate IT governance. Furthermore, this study focuses on combining institutional and individual perspectives to explain how individuals can take decisions in response to institutional influences.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 381-401
Author(s):  
Weiwei Wang ◽  
Haiwei Zhou ◽  
Lidan Guo

The emergency supply of transboundary water resources is a prominent problem affecting the social and economic development of basin countries. However, current water supply decisions on transboundary water resources may ignore the psychological perception of multi-stakeholders, and the evolution of emergencies increases the uncertainty of decision making. Both factors would lead to the low acceptance of water-related decisions. Utility satisfaction, perceived losses, and quantity satisfaction were selected in this paper to identify the perceived satisfaction of upstream governments, downstream governments, and the public, respectively, over multiple decision-making stages. A modeling framework combining prospect theory and the multi-stage multi-objective programming methodology was then developed to measure the perceived satisfaction of different stakeholders in a watershed under emergency. A two-stage NSGA-II and TOPSIS based approach was adopted to find the optimal compromise solution to solve the model. The framework was applied in the Lancang–Mekong River basin to provide suggestions to decision makers. Upstream decision makers must choose a moderate proportional fairness degree when making emergency decisions to maximize the perceived satisfaction of all stakeholders. Meanwhile, the perceived loss of downstream countries with low water demand should be considered first in the formulation of emergency water supply plans. Furthermore, although water supply from upstream countries can improve perceived water quantity satisfaction of downstream publics, additional actions must still be taken to change the traditional concepts of the public.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (S2) ◽  
pp. s70-s73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dick Q.P. Fundter ◽  
Bas Jonkman ◽  
Steve Beerman ◽  
Corsmas L.P.M. Goemans ◽  
Rosanna Briggs ◽  
...  

AbstractDuring the 15th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine in Amsterdam, May 2007 (15WCDEM), a targeted agenda program (TAP) about the public health aspects of large-scale floods was organized. The main goal of the TAP was the establishment of an overview of issues that would help governmental decision-makers to develop policies to increase the resilience of the citizens during floods. During the meetings, it became clear that citizens have a natural resistance to evacuations. This results in death due to drowning and injuries. Recently, communication and education programs have been developed that may increase awareness that timely evacuation is important and can be life-saving. After a flood, health problems persist over prolonged periods, including increased death rates during the first year after a flood and a higher incidence of chronic illnesses that last for decades after the flood recedes. Population-based resilience (bottom-up) and governmental responsibility (top-down) must be combined to prepare regions for the health impact of evacuations and floods. More research data are needed to become better informed about the health impact and consequences of translocation of health infrastructures after evacuations. A better understanding of the consequences of floods will support governmental decision-making to mitigate the health impact. A top-10 priority action list was formulated.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toma Strle ◽  
Olga Markič ◽  

In the following article we first present the growing trend of incorporating neuroscience into the law, and the growing acceptance of and trust in neuroscience’s mechanistic and reductionistic explanations of the human mind. We then present and discuss some studies that show how nudging peoples’ beliefs about matters related to human agency (such as free will, decision-making, or self-control) towards a more deterministic, mechanistic and/or reductionistic conception, exerts an influence on their very actions, mentality, and brain processes. We suggest that the neuroscientific view of the human mind exerts an influence on the very cognitive phenomena neuroscience falsely believes to be studying objectively. This holds especially when we consider the systematic integration of neuroscience into the public domain, such as the law. For, such an integration acts as a reinforcement of the public’s and legal decision-makers’ endorsement of and trust in neuroscience’s view of human nature that further changes how people think and act. Such looping effects of neurolaw are probably inevitable. Accordingly, we should be aware of the scope of neuroscientific explanations and be careful not to overstate neuroscientific evidence and findings in legal contexts.


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
pp. 161-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE KOVALEV ◽  
JOHANN KÖPPEL ◽  
ALEXANDER DROZDOV ◽  
ECKHARDT DITTRICH

Since 1988, the Russian Federation has required that laws, plans, programs and all kind of projects undergo an environmental assessment. A mandatory component of the EIA in Russia is public participation. In this paper different case studies are used to find out to what extent public could influence environmental decision making processes from the early eighties until 2002. The cases selected include several where the public was passive or where it had limited activities, but also some where the participation was strong and projects were improved or stopped. As far as these case studies highlighted, the civil society in Russia can be described as an organized and sometimes strong factor in the approval process. The behaviour displayed by decision-makers, however, revealed at times a remarkable democratic deficit.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Petrus Sokibi ◽  
Nurul Bahiyah

Talun sub-district is a government institution that provides public services to the public, which at this time there is no assessment of service satisfaction from the community so that the District Talun cannot know the assessment or complaints from the public to public services provided. The research aims to determine the level of public satisfaction of Public Service in Talun Sub-district. AHP is a complex multi-criteria decision-making method, in an unstructured situation into sections that are then shaped into functional hierarchies to present problems to be solved and then build a priority sequence for alternatives by pairwise alternative comparisons based on judgments of decision makers against a system. The appraisal application yields the value of the public satisfaction level and the eigenvector ranked according to the highest data as the final value of the AHP calculation so that the eigenvector value obtained can facilitate the Camat to see which elements of service are not good.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Plantinga

Public servants involved in South Africa’s innovation policy and programmes are under pressure to adopt more agile and open ways of working to support industrial and social innovation, especially in relation to achieving inclusive development outcomes. Implementing these practices in public sector departments is a challenge. Whilst innovation agencies were established to play a more independent mediating role between the private sector and government, they operate within similar legal frameworks and depend on the same political principals for funding as their parent departments. As a result, there is significant friction between expected innovation-enabling practices and established bureaucratic procedures. Instead of calling for the de-bureaucratisation of the public sector, this chapter seeks to highlight the significant diversity in public organisations and officials involved in stimulating industrial and social innovation; the reasons why certain procedures and practices are in place; and the need to develop targeted interventions that can improve specific routines, capacities and legitimacy at organisational and individual levels as a way to achieve innovation outcomes


1983 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-87
Author(s):  
S. S. Brand

Private and public decision-making The interaction between the private and public sectors is important in South Africa. Much criticism is expressed by the one sector against the other. This can be partly attributed to an incomplete understanding of the processes of decision-making in the two sectors, and of the differences between them. A comparison is drawn between the most important elements of the decision-making processes in the two sectors. Public decision-making deals mostly with matters concerning the community and the economy as a whole, whereas private decision-making is concerned mostly with parts of the whole. The aims at which decision-making in the two sectors are directed, differ accordingly, as do the perceptions of the respective decision-makers of the environment in which they make decisions. As a consequence, the criteria for the success of a decision also differ substantially between the two sectors. The implications of these differences between private and public decision-making for the approach to inflation and the financing of housing, are dealt with as examples. Finally, differences between the ways in which decisions are implemented in the two sectors, also appear to be an important cause of much of the criticism from the private sector about decision-making in the public sector.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Goble ◽  
Trevor Hill ◽  

The coastal environment is one of the most utilised for human activities; providing a diverse range of goods and services such as fisheries, water purification and coastal erosion protection. This results in the need for effective, ongoing management and informed decision making, to ensure long-term sustainability of the coastal environment. However, Goble et al. (2017) highlight that institutional knowledge and capacity are currently limited to achieve the objectives of effective coastal management. This research considers the use of ArcGIS Portal as a component of a Decision Support System (or Info-portal) for coastal management in KwaZulu-Natal, through the development of an online, interactive mapping platform. This platform offers a portal to decision makers to access and interrogate data and information, thus informing decision making. The development of this tool followed a participatory approach, and engagement with end-users throughout the process to ensure that the tool meets users’ requirements. To date, the info-portal has been well utilised by both decision makers and members of the public that are interested in the coast. It offers an excellent example of the power of a spatial tool in improving decision making.


2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Martin ◽  
Julia Abelson ◽  
Peter Singer

Objectives: The literature on participation in priority-setting has three key gaps: it focuses on techniques for obtaining public input into priority-setting that are consultative mechanisms and do not involve the public directly in decision-making; it focuses primarily on the public's role in priority-setting, not on all potential participants; and the range of roles that various participants play in a group making priority decisions has not been described. To begin addressing these gaps, we interviewed individuals who participated on two priority-setting committees to identify key insights from participants about participation. Methods: A qualitative study consisting of interviews with decision-makers, including patients and members of the public. Results: Members of the public can contribute directly to important aspects of priority-setting. The participants described six specific priority-setting roles: committee chair, administrator, medical specialist, medical generalist, public representative and patient representative. They also described the contributions of each role to priority-setting. Conclusions: Using the insights from decision-makers, we have described lessons related to direct involvement of members of the public and patients in priority-setting, and have identified six roles and the contributions of each role.


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