Modeling Ethical and Operational Preferences in Automated Driving Systems

Whereas automated driving technology has made tremendous gains in the last decade, significant questions remain regarding its integration into society. Given its revolutionary nature, the use of automated driving systems (ADSs) is accompanied by myriad novel quandaries relating to both operational and ethical concerns that are relevant to numerous stakeholders (e.g., governments, manufacturers, and passengers). When considering any such problem, the ADS’s decision-making calculus is always a central component. This is true for concerns about public perception and trust to others regarding explainability and legal certainty. Therefore, in this manuscript, we set forth a general decision-analytic framework tailorable to multitudinous stakeholders. More specifically, we develop and validate a generic tree of ADS management objectives, explore potential attributes for their measurement, and provide multiattribute utility functions for implementation. Given the contention surrounding numerous ethical concerns in ADS operations, we explore how each of the aforementioned components can be tailored in accordance with the stakeholder’s desired ethical perspective. A simulation environment is developed upon which our framework is tested. Within this environment we illustrate how our approach can be leveraged by stakeholders to make strategic trade-offs regarding ADS behavior and to inform policymaking efforts. In so doing, our framework is demonstrated as a practical, tractable, and transparent means of modeling ADS decision making.

DOMINANT STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY

In implementing trade policy measures, governments usually select from a range of instruments including quotas, subsidies (explicit or implicit) and tariffs. In this paper we consider the potential gain of a government pursuing a two-part trade policy: an import license for entry, along with a per-unit tariff on imports. The model is a three-step game between home and foreign countries in the Cournot duopoly. The paper demonstrates that two-part trade policy is dominant.

Strategic trade policy with interlocking cross-ownership

By analysing interlocking cross-ownership, this work reconsiders the inefficiency of activist governments that set subsidies for their exporters (Brander and Spencer, J Int Econ 18:83–100). Making use of a third-market Cournot duopoly model, we show that the implementation of strategic trade policy in the form of a tax (subsidy) when goods are differentiated (complements) is Pareto-superior to free trade within precise ranges of firms’ cross-ownership, richly depending on the degree of product competition. These results challenge the conventional ones in which public intervention (1) is always the provision of a subsidy and (2) always leads to a Pareto-inferior (resp. Pareto-superior) equilibrium when products are substitutes (resp. complements).

When Knowledge Is Not Enough: Individual Preconditions for Strategic Voting

Voters often have to decide between supporting their preferred candidate or choosing a less appealing but more viable alternative. What are the underlying mechanisms that enable citizens to navigate these strategic trade-offs? Combining experimental and observational evidence from the UK, we differentiate three crucial preconditions for strategic voting---motivation, information, and capabilities---and provide converging evidence illuminating how these factors interact. Specifically, we find that high levels of motivation are a necessary condition for the beneficial effects of information and capabilities to manifest. Our findings suggest that a narrow focus on political knowledge to improve strategic voting and thereby democratic representation is short-sighted. Methodologically, we offer a novel experimental framework that enables researchers to independently manipulate different mechanisms underlying citizen competence.

A Post-COVID-19 Economic Recovery Model: The national domestic economic auto-sustainability Model (NDEAS-Model)

The significant damage of COVID-19 on the world economy forces us to reconsider a deep restructuration domestically and internationally in the next few years. This paper suggests a Post-COVID-19 reconstruction model is called “The National Domestic Economic Auto-Sustainability Model (NDEAS-Model).” The NDEAS-Model proposes four economic platforms: (i) the domestic education and technical training standardization platform (P1); (ii) the domestic productive infrastructure and transportation platform (P2); (iii) the selective strategic trade, investment, and tourism protection platform (P3); (iv) the environmental and natural resources management platform (P4). The main objective of NDEAS-Model is to avoid imported massive pandemic diseases, non-sustainable and weak food security platforms, and job diversion, respectively.

Lapses in perceptual decisions reflect exploration

Perceptual decision-makers often display a constant rate of errors independent of evidence strength. These 'lapses' are treated as a nuisance arising from noise tangential to the decision, e.g. inattention or motor errors. Here, we use a multisensory decision task in rats to demonstrate that these explanations cannot account for lapses' stimulus dependence. We propose a novel explanation: lapses reflect a strategic trade-off between exploiting known rewarding actions and exploring uncertain ones. We tested this model's predictions by selectively manipulating one action's reward magnitude or probability. As uniquely predicted by this model, changes were restricted to lapses associated with that action. Finally, we show that lapses are a powerful tool for assigning decision-related computations to neural structures based on disruption experiments (here, posterior striatum and secondary motor cortex). These results suggest that lapses reflect an integral component of decision-making and are informative about action values in normal and disrupted brain states.