Belgium legalised voluntary euthanasia in 2002, thus ending the long isolation of the Netherlands as the only country in which doctors could openly give lethal injections to patients who have requested help in dying. Meanwhile in Oregon, in the United States, doctors may prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients, who can use them to end their life--if they are able to swallow and digest them....

This study aims at explaining the factors affecting the adoption intention of mobile data services from the perspective of consumers as users. In this study we focus on the value users can potentially gain from using these services. We hypothesize that if we can examine users' utilitarian, hedonic, uniqueness, epistemic and economic value, then we can explain and predict their intentions to use...

In "The Prospects for Consensus and Convergence in the Animal Rights Debate" Gary E. Varner altempts to provide a direction for reconciliation between utilitarian and inherent value views on the subject of biomedical research testing on nonhuman animals. 1 These two views are opposed because the former allows some testing and the latter does not. In this paper I will argue that Varner's prospec...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) should reduce traffic accidents, but they will sometimes have to choose between two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing themselves and their passenger to save the pedestrians. Defining the algorithms that will help AVs make these moral decisions is a formidable challenge. We found that participants in six Amazon Mechanical Turk studies approved of ut...

Successful negotiators look beyond a purely utilitarian view. We propose a new agent architecture that integrates the utilitarian, information, and semantic views allowing the definition of strategies that take these three dimensions into account. Information-based agency values the information in dialogues in the context of a communication language based on a structured ontology and on the not...

Can websites be designed to be both utilitarian and hedonic? This article approaches this question by identifying Web attributes, their direct impacts on experiential flow, and their direct and indirect impacts on the utilitarian and hedonic aspects of Web performance. The results presented here support the proposal that, as an information-laden medium, a successful website must be able to use ...

We show that, in a sufficiently large population satisfying certain statistical regularities, it is often possible to accurately estimate the utilitarian social welfare function, even if we only have very noisy data about individual utility functions and interpersonal utility comparisons. In particular, we show that it is often possible to identify an optimal or close-to-optimal utilitarian soc...

We study the complexity of (approximate) winner determination under the Monroe and Chamberlin–Courant multiwinner voting rules, which determine the set of representatives by optimizing the total (dis)satisfaction of the voters with their representatives. The total (dis)satisfaction is calculated either as the sum of individual (dis)satisfactions (the utilitarian case) or as the (dis)satisfactio...

Motivated by the fact that social media are continuously gaining in popularity, firms are piloting different approaches of promoting their products and services. However, there is much debate in the academic and business community about the effectiveness of social media as a platform for marketing. Specifically, practitioners are concerned with how Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is spread through these si...

Curriculum proposals and counter proposals characterize technology education. Some proposals enjoy widespread attention, others attract only momentary notice. Considerable incongruity, moreover, sometimes exists between stated objectives and the methods proposed to achieve them (Clark, 1989). One source of uncertainty is the lack of clearly articulated curriculum designs. A curriculum design pa...