Vaccination Against COVID-19 as a Christian Duty? A Risk-Analytic Approach

The Covid-19 pandemic inspired a fierce discussion on pros and cons of vaccinations among Christians. Frequently, this emotional dispute is not based on facts, and this might be due to the fact that the decision situation (“to be vaccinate or not to be vaccinated”) is quite complex. In this paper we develop a risk-analytic model of the vaccination decision and explain the benefits of vaccinations against SARS-Cov-2 on different levels. Furthermore, we show that the Great Commandment of love calls for avoiding all harm to the neighbor even if this harm is indirect and under uncertainty. Consequently, it is a Christian duty to love one’s neighbor and be vaccinated.

A Web-Based Decision Support Systems Framework for Ill-Structured Decision Situations

Decisions and actions in an ill-structured situation often include high-time constraints, lack of information, and poor cognitive efforts. Obtaining the necessary information through an information systems tool is supposed to be the best solution in such situations. To expose the decision situation, this study has taken the fire and civil defense service as the field of study. In exploring the required information resources, elements of the system architecture, and suitability of the proposed system in the current field, this study has resorted to the qualitative approach. To assess the dependability and performance of the systems, this study has used the RAS metrics and a black-box test. The result showed that the reliability stood within 62.70–70.00%, and its availability stood at 99.00% with a downtime of 3.65 days/year from a three-month study. As per the black-box test with standard 4G network connection, the system takes an average loading time of 1.00s for alphanumeric contents, 3.50s for images and graphics, and 5.50s for loading maps and navigations. This research evidenced that, the local emergency response and rescue units in developing countries like Bangladesh might want to use a well-designed response support system for improved acquisition, dissemination, and utilization of response information.

Incremental Decision Rules Algorithm: A Probabilistic and Dynamic Approach to Decisional Data Stream Problems

Data science is currently one of the most promising fields used to support the decision-making process. Particularly, data streams can give these supportive systems an updated base of knowledge that allows experts to make decisions with updated models. Incremental Decision Rules Algorithm (IDRA) proposes a new incremental decision-rule method based on the classical ID3 approach to generating and updating a rule set. This algorithm is a novel approach designed to fit a Decision Support System (DSS) whose motivation is to give accurate responses in an affordable time for a decision situation. This work includes several experiments that compare IDRA with the classical static but optimized ID3 (CREA) and the adaptive method VFDR. A battery of scenarios with different error types and rates are proposed to compare these three algorithms. IDRA improves the accuracies of VFDR and CREA in most common cases for the simulated data streams used in this work. In particular, the proposed technique has proven to perform better in those scenarios with no error, low noise, or high-impact concept drifts.

Basic Bidding Formats: Characteristics and Differences

In standard auction theory, the ‘revenue equivalence theorem’ asserts that the outcomes of the elementary allocation methods coincide. However, bidding processes differ fundamentally with regard to the decision situation of the participants: Is it at all imperative to take into consideration the number of competitors (‘stochastic’ strategy) or not (‘deterministic’ course of action)? Furthermore, established auction theory neglects the operating modes of procurement alternatives under uncertainty. Apart from the lacking knowledge how many rivals have to be beaten, tenderers regularly are ignorant of the buyer’s reserve price. Then it is even more tentative to calculate an offer based on probability theory. Consequently, the suppliers’ propensity to collude increases.

Reassembling Discrimination

In the last three parts of the dissertation, we have dissected discrimination. First of all, we said that two requirements have to be fulfilled in order that an act is discriminatory: (1) In the decision situation, there has to be a differentiation between two or more things/people. (2) At least one of these things/people has to be treated in a systematically different way compared to the other things/people.

Where Does Taste-Based Discrimination Come From?

As the last chapter has revealed, the reason why a decision-maker makes use of statistical discrimination is easily comprehensible. If a decision situation underlies uncertainty, he has to assess the probabilities of possible scenarios with some degree of vagueness. In this process, group memberships of providers can serve as a proxy for these probabilities.

Three Generic Policies for Sustained Market Growth Based on Two Interdependent Organizational Resources—A Simulation Study and Implications

This article addresses the generic dynamic decision problem of how to achieve sustained market growth by increasing two interdependent organizational resources needed (1) to increase and (2) to sustain demand. The speed and costs of increasing each resource are different. Failure to account for this difference leads to policies that drive a quick increase of demand followed by decline. Three generic policies derived from the literature have been implemented in a system dynamics model. Simulation shows that they all can generate sustained exponential growth but differ in performance: even policies criticized in the literature for provoking overshoot and collapse can drive sustained growth. This leads to questions for further research regarding (1) the set of generic policies and its structure and (2) concerning the reasoning of human decision-makers when choosing between such policies and the salience of important but easily overlooked features of the decision situation.

Choice Behavior in Innovation Exchange Between Buyers and Sellers

This article extends the research on Behavioral Supply Management, and specifically characterizes the decision to exchange supplier–developed innovations. For the innovation exchange to take place, both actors in the dyad must actually make the decision to exchange an innovation with one another. Therefore, buyers’ as well as suppliers’ decision making are part of this research. The decision to exchange innovation is highly relevant, as innovations play an increasingly important role in business research. The applied methodology is a mouse-lab process-tracing experiment. The study is based on computer cursor moving and click data from 658 managers. As the conceptualized decision situation is highly specific, practitioners can build upon their business experience and are the experiment respondents. The sample includes buyer and supplier sub-groups. We differentiate our findings based on innovation intensity (i.e., incremental vs. disruptive innovations). The findings show that the intensity of an innovation does not imply different decision-making per se, although distinguishing incremental from disruptive innovation is often proposed. Furthermore, the relevance of exclusiveness (i.e., a buyer has exclusive access to a supplier’s innovation) is of minor relevance for the supplier but also for the buyer, even when these innovations are disruptive. Finally, the intensity of innovations is only relevant in high-quality buyer–supplier relationships. Under these circumstances, decision makers show irrational behavior, as they prefer alternatives with low economic benefits. That aspect points to the identification of relational decision traps and other theoretical and managerial implications.

May Machines Take Lives to Save Lives? Human Perceptions of Autonomous Robots (with the Capacity to Kill)

In the future, artificial agents are likely to make life-and-death decisions about humans. Ordinary people are the likely arbiters of whether these decisions are morally acceptable. We summarize research on how ordinary people evaluate artificial (compared to human) agents that make life-and-death decisions. The results suggest that many people are inclined to morally evaluate artificial agents’ decisions, and when asked how the artificial and human agents should decide, they impose the same norms on them. However, when confronted with how the agents did in fact decide, people judge the artificial agents’ decisions differently from those of humans. This difference is best explained by justifications people grant the human agents (imagining their experience of the decision situation) but do not grant the artificial agent (whose experience they cannot imagine). If people fail to infer the decision processes and justifications of artificial agents, these agents will have to explicitly communicate such justifications to people, so they can understand and accept their decisions.

Free Time Across the Life Course

In most industrialised countries, citizens enjoy a very large amount of free time towards the end of their lives, when they are retired, but find it very costly to access free time during the middle part of their lives. This is concerning because those who die early are deprived of the reward of free time that retirement holds. Extreme discrepancies between a time-rich old age and a time-scarce middle age are not, however, inevitable: some states incentivise long work hours during middle age in combination with early retirement, whereas others incentivise shorter work hours during middle age and later retirement. This variation raises the thus far unexplored question of how a just society should design policies that affect the costs of access to free time across the life course. I answer this question by using a hypothetical decision-situation where prudent choosers must allocate access to free time across different life stages.