South African law recognises a financial claim against a health provider for negligently failing to advise an expectant mother that she might give birth to a child suffering from a severe health condition or congenital disability. In December 2014, the Constitutional Court handed down a judgment that could lead to financial claims by the child, who was subsequently born with a severe health con...

The contribution of sexual selection to diversification remains poorly understood after decades of research. This may be in part because studies have focused predominantly on the strength of sexual selection, which offers an incomplete view of selection regimes. By contrast, students of natural selection focus on environmental differences that help compare selection regimes across populations. ...

Multicriteria conflict arises in pairwise comparisons, where each alternative outperforms the other one on some criterion, which imposes a trade-off. Comparing two alternatives can be difficult if their respective advantages are of high magnitude (the attribute spread is large). In this paper, we investigate to which extent conflict in a comparison situation can lead decision makers to express ...

In some MCDM techniques Ð most notably in Outranking Methods Ð the result of the comparison of a finite set of alternatives according to several criteria is summarised using a fuzzy preference relation. This fuzzy relation does not, in general, possess "nice properties" such as transitivity or completeness and elaborating a recommendation on the basis of such information is not an obvious task....

Mass customization, as a means to meet individual consumer’s need on a large scale, has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. However, as customers and their needs grow increasingly diverse, meeting every consumer’s need has become a surefire way to add unnecessary cost and complexity to operations. Furthermore, consumers are not all really ready for mass custo...

Using a research design that traces siblings’ preferences for postmaterialistic values in Germany over two decades, this paper provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart’s thesis of value change, we test the combined socialization and scarcity hypothesis against the social learning hypothesis, a prominent rival account of preadult value preference formation...

According to previous research, the value of information about a risky decision does not seem to depend in any consistent or predictable fashion on the features of the decision problem. For instance, the relationship between value of information and the degree of risk aversion can be non-monotonic, seemingly counterintuitive in some cases. This paper shows that value of information obeys a simp...

This chapter briefly presents a number of techniques that can be used to build recommendations in each of three classical problem statements (choosing, ranking, and sorting) on the basis of a preference model. We start with the simple case of a preference model based on a value function. We then turn to more complex cases.

We develop an on-line shopping assistant that can help a e-shopper to select a product from many on-line shops based on the personal preference. The shopping assistant is developed based on value networks which extend Bayesian networks with user preference. On-line shopping of bicycles is used as the application domain.

The priority problem of incomplete preference relations is investigated. Using the transformation relation between multiplicative preference relation and fuzzy preference relation, we develop a least-square model to obtain the collective priority vector of the incomplete preference relations presented by multiple decision makers, with the existence condition of the solution being developed. Mea...