I am hated, therefore I am: The Enemy in Yorùbá Imaginary

This essay will study how the Yorùbá conceptualize “ọ̀tá” or the enemy, a trope that recurs in various cultural phenomena such as music, prayers, and other social rituals. The Yorùbá worldview of the enemy has profound implications on the way they frame issues that affect their mental, physical, social, and general well-being. Health studies, religious studies, and social ethics studies and analyses have mostly tried to investigate the enemy as a concept borne out of Yorùbá cosmology which serves as a conduit for superstition, fear, and other seemingly irrational behavior. In this essay, I frame the concept of “ọ̀tá” through the theatrical dialectic of antagonist/protagonist theory. The enemy, I argue, is the way the Yorùbá metaphorize all kinds of antagonism—material and immaterial ones—into an imaginative texture that gives it the tangibility they need to triumph against those situations. This essay will interrogate how this personification of antagonism is achieved by studying Ifá texts, Yorùbá popular music of a period, and contemporary Pentecostal prayers.

Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Supply of Crowd Vehicles and Time Windows

The growth of e-commerce has increased demand for last-mile deliveries, increasing the level of congestion in the existing transportation infrastructure in urban areas. Crowdsourcing deliveries can provide the additional capacity needed to meet the growing demand in a cost-effective way. We introduce a setting where a crowd-shipping platform sells heterogeneous products of different sizes from a central depot. Items sold vary from groceries to electronics. Some items must be delivered within a time window, whereas others need a customer signature. Furthermore, customer presence is not guaranteed, and some deliveries may need to be returned to the depot. Delivery requests are fulfilled by a fleet of professional drivers and a pool of crowd drivers. We present a crowd-shipping platform that standardizes crowd drivers’ capacities and compensates them to return undelivered packages back to the depot. We formulate a two-stage stochastic model, and we propose a branch and price algorithm to solve the problem exactly and a column generation heuristic to solve larger problems quickly. We further develop an analytical method to calculate upper bounds on the supply of vehicles and an innovative cohesive pricing problem to generate columns for the pool of crowd drivers. Computational experiments are carried out on modified Solomon instances with a pool of 100 crowd vehicles. The branch and price algorithm is able to solve instances of up to 100 customers. We show that the value of the stochastic solution can be as high as 18% when compared with the solution obtained from a deterministic simplification of the model. Significant cost reductions of up to 28% are achieved by implementing crowd drivers with low compensations or higher capacities. Finally, we evaluate what happens when crowd drivers are given the autonomy to select routes based on rational and irrational behavior. There is no cost increase when crowd drivers are rational and select routes that have a higher compensation first. However, when crowd drivers are irrational and select routes randomly, the cost can increase up to 4.2% for some instances.

Irrationality of managers’ behavior in corporate financial decision making

Purpose of the study: The subject of consideration is the behavioral aspects of corporate finance. The consideration is devoted to the basic inclinations of psychological nature characteristic of managers. The main purpose of the article is to characterize the irrational behavior of managers in the process of financial decision-making in the enterprise. Methodology: The paper was prepared with the use the critical literature review method mainly in the field of behavioral corporate finance. Main findings: The discussion shows that behavioral corporate finance focuses mainly on cognitive and motivational-emotional processes in managers, which may occur in various decision areas within which managers make choices. There are three groups of psychological phenomena and inclinations that are characteristic of managers who manage business entities, namely predispositions to systematic inference errors, heuristics, and the presentation effect. Application of the study: The presented article refers to the irrational behavior of managers in the process of making financial decisions in the company. It implies reflections in such scientific fields as, among others, economics and finance, management and psychology. The use of the tools of psychology allows analyzing the problems of financial decision-making of managers in the enterprise, noticing in them some deviations from rationality that can affect the efficiency of the enterprise. The content of the article can be useful for managers making financial decisions in an enterprise. Originality/Novelty of the study: Behavioral finance is a young discipline of finance, the scientific output of which in Poland is still small. Behavioral aspects are just beginning to gain importance in the decision-making process, especially the financial one. The tendencies of managers to irrationality in the decision-making process presented in this article allow us to better understand the errors, psychological factors that may cause wrong decisions, which in turn may translate into poorer financial condition of the whole enterprise. The article can inspire further research and inquiry in the field of behavioral finance and contribute to other interesting scientific studies.

“Smart Regulation” Means that Influence Consumer Choice of Healthy Products

Introduction: choosing healthy foods is vital for every person. The means of legal regulation can be used to ensure healthy choices. The purpose of the study is to identify the main means of “smart regulation”, acceptable and effective in the field of relations with the participation of consumers. The paper uses the methods of description and interpretation; the theoretical methods of formal and dialectical logic. Results: taking into account the achievements of behavioral economics, it is necessary to recognize that a person is prone to irrational behavior, misjudging information, and possible risks. “Smart regulation” involves achieving the desired result in the simplest possible way, including the so-called “nudge”, which makes it easier to choose the desired behavior. Nudge tools in government regulation can be used to make choices in favor of healthy foods. The consumer protection legislation uses the methods to determine the architecture of consumer choice in favor of healthy, high-quality, safe food. The state can establish rules that require manufacturers to indicate a certain set of information on the product, and sellers – to lay out the products in such a way that the consumer’s attention is focused on healthy products. Conclusions: in relationships involving consumers, it is necessary to use “smart regulation” means to influence the choice of healthy foods. The basis for the use of such means is to bring to the attention of consumers proper and reliable information about the principles of a healthy diet, as well as about the product, its ingredients, and features. Such information can be placed in the form of product labels, which should be clear and understandable.

Nudge in The Conditions of Digital Transformation: Behavioral Basis

Digital transformation in most cases has a positive impact on the economy. However, there is a possibility of negative consequences that worsen the standard of life of the population. Society wants to avoid a decline in living standards. The state policy to minimize the risks of digitalization should be developed for these purposes. Digital transformation leads to the complication of the technological environment, to the deformation of social relations, to a change in decision-making processes. The complexity of the technogenic environment leads to increased cognitive distortions and irrational behavior. Living standards are declining as a result. Classical approaches to government regulation often do not take into account psychophysiological and sociocultural behavioral factors. As a result, the regulation does not have the expected effect. This is especially evident in situations of uncertainty and longtime intervals. Behavioral economics and nudge can help solve these problems. This article provides a systematization and description of the factors that determine behavior. Decision-making processes are characterized. A systematization and explanation of cognitive distortions is proposed. An overview of approaches to the use of nudges to prevent cognitive distortions is proposed. Cases of using nudges to reduce the risks of digitalization are presented.

Application of catastrophe progression method on hybrid multiple attribute decision-making problems based on regret theory

In order to effectively solve the decision-making problems with the diversity of evaluation information, the dynamics of research objects, the limitations of subjective authorization, and the irrational behavior of decision-makers, this paper extends catastrophe progression method to solve hybrid multiple attribute decision-making problems based on regret theory. Firstly, some basic theories are introduced. Secondly, the original catastrophe progression method is extended by using the regret theory, which is employed to solve the multiple attribute decision-making problems with hybrid evaluation information. Finally, a real-life case study of selecting a fresh cold chain logistics service provider is used to verify the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method, and a comparative analysis with the TOPSIS method and the sensitivity of the regret avoidance coefficient is analyzed in this article.

Cognitive and Medical Misanthropology: Corona Parties and Kolo Dancing by the Monument

This paper looks at so-called corona parties in Serbia, which can be seen as a specific paradigm of exhibiting irresponsible health behavior during an epidemic. The term refers to illegal gatherings of a large number of people in circumstances when all gatherings are restricted under anti-epidemic measures. A phenomenon similar to corona parties and co-ocurring with them in the Serbian socio-cultural and pandemic temporal context, is the dancing of the traditional kolo dance in public spaces. Both phenomena represent a conscious disregard for one's own health and of regulations introduced by the authorities, and at the same time an emphatic public display of indifference towards the epidemiological situation in the country, and rejection of the consequent legal restrictions on public life. The paper aims to establish the cultural background of such behavior, i.e. to ascertain its socio-cultural meaning. The indirect or direct endangerment of one’s own or other people’s health, particularly in a pandemic, can be seen as a misanthropic act. The cultural notions on which such irrational behavior is based are a consequence of a postmodernist relativization of previously existing socio-cultural discourse on science, and are counterintuitive. Behavior based on these notions is an irrational response to changes in socio-cultural reality due to COVID-19. The response is not only irrational but also ineffective, as it cannot eliminate the undesired consequences of the given situation, neither in terms of the illness itself, nor in terms of how it will be managed by those who have been put in charge by the government. Due to this, such behavior can also be seen simply as a deliberate defiance of rules. The misanthropic quality of the behavior of those who ignore anti-epidemic measures by dancing kolo in the streets or attending corona parties is evident in the conscious rejection of the principle of not harming others. Ignoring the possible health risks to themselves, they ignore the possible health risks to others, and thus become social factors of biological contagion. It is in this way that such behavior becomes the cause of the extension of the very state of socio-cultural reality against which it is supposed to be directed.

Altruistic Preference Models of Low-Carbon E-Commerce Supply Chain

With the gradual popularity of online sales and the enhancement of consumers’ low-carbon awareness, the low-carbon e-commerce supply chain (LCECSC) has developed rapidly. However, most of the current research on LCECSC assumes that the decision-making body is rational, and there is less research on the irrational behavior of the e-platform altruistic preference. Therefore, aiming at the LCECSC composed of a single e-platform and a single manufacturer, this paper establishes two basic models with or without altruistic preference. Additionally, this paper combines the characteristics of online sales and assumes that altruistic preference is a proportional function of commission, then establishes a commission-based extended model with altruistic preference to further explore the influence of commission on its altruistic preference. The current literature does not consider this point, nor does it analyze the influence of other parameters on the degree of altruism preference. By comparing the optimal decisions and numerical analysis among the models, the following conclusions can be drawn that: (1) different from the traditional offline supply chain, the profit of the dominator e-platform is lower than the profit of the follower manufacturer; (2) when the consumers’ carbon emission reduction elasticity coefficient increases, service level, sales price, carbon emission reduction, sales, supply chain members profits, and system profit increase, ultimately improving economic and environmental performances; (3) the altruistic preference behavior of the e-platform is a behavior of ‘profit transferring’. The moderate altruistic preference is conducive to the stable operation and long-term development of LCECSC.

Fuzzy linear regression analysis for groundwater response to meteorological drought in the aquifer system of Xanthi plain, NE Greece

This paper studies, through the principles of fuzzy set theory, groundwater response to meteorological drought in the case of an aquifer system located in the plains at the southeast of Xanthi, NE Greece. Meteorological drought is expressed through standardized Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDISt) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which are calculated for various reference periods. These drought indices are considered as independent variables in multiple fuzzy linear regression based on Tanaka's model, while the observed water table regarding two areas is used as a dependent variable. The fuzzy linear regression of Tanaka is characterized by the inclusion constraints where all the observed data must be included in the produced fuzzy band. Hence, each fuzzy output can get an interval of values where a membership degree corresponds to each of them. A modification of the Tanaka model by adding constraints is proposed in order to avoid irrational behavior. The results show that there was a significant influence of the meteorological drought of the previous hydrological year, while geology plays an important role. Furthermore, the use of RDISt improves the results of fuzzy linear regressions in all cases. Two suitability measures and a measure of comparison between fuzzy numbers are used.