BACKGROUND Changes to the structure of medical training worldwide require doctors to decide on their career specialty at an increasingly early stage after graduation. We studied trends in career choices for surgery, and the eventual career destinations, of UK graduates who declared an early preference for surgery. METHODS Postal questionnaires were sent, at regular time intervals after qualif...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...

This paper describes a method for planning with rich qualitative, temporally extended preferences (QTEPs) using lookahead heuristics inspired by those employed in state-of-the-art classical planners. Key to our approach is a transformation of the planning domain into an equivalent but simplified planning domain. First, compound preference formulae are transformed into simpler, equivalent prefer...

We consider voting over combinatorial domains, where alternatives are binary tuples. We assume that votes are specified as conditionally lexicographic preferences, or LP trees. We study aggregation problems of LP tree votes for several positional scoring rules. Our main goal is to demonstrate that answer-set programming can be effective in solving the winner and the evaluation problems for inst...

This article tries to explain the exceptional levels of knowledge creation in certain industrial clusters, levels that are seemingly higher than what is implied by the usual models of atomistic agents who do not internalize externalities. For this purpose, we introduce reference-dependent utility into an OLG model of an industrial cluster where agents allocate resources between consumption and ...

Core-selection is a crucial property of social choice functions, or rules, in social choice literature. It is also desirable to address the incentive of agents to cheat by misreporting their preferences. This paper investigates an exchange problem where each agent may have multiple indivisible goods, agents’ preferences over sets of goods are assumed to be lexicographic, and side payments are n...

BACKGROUND Information needs and resource preferences of office-based general pediatricians have not been well characterized. METHODS Data collected from a sample of twenty office-based urban/suburban general pediatricians consisted of: (a) a demographic survey about participants' practice and computer use, (b) semi-structured interviews on their use of different types of information resource...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions in order for binary voting choices over a finite number of pairs of alternatives to be consistent with voter preferences that admit concave utility representations. These conditions imply simple testable restrictions on the location of voters’ ideal points, and can be used to predict individual voting behavior. On the other hand, if the location of ...

People’s choices can be predicted given information about their preferences. Learning people’s preferences is the inverse problem of inferring preferences from choices. Given the apparent relationship between choice prediction and preference learning, it is natural to ask whether the two are mutually consistent. Given weak assumptions, we show that no single, consistent model of the relationshi...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...