This case report presents the experience of a training course on bioethics for nurses and physicians of the Family Health Strategy in Santo André, SP. This study is based on problem-based learning and deliberative bioethics, and aimed at presenting the deliberation procedure as a means of handling ethical issues. Contents were addressed in a cross-section manner through five sequential activity...

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achiev­ ing. In this paper, we present a branching­ time possible-worlds model for representing and reasoning about, beliefs, goals, inten­ tions, time, actions, probabilities, and...

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologi...

Current theories argue that human decision making is largely based on quick, automatic, and intuitive processes that are occasionally supplemented by slow controlled deliberation. Researchers, therefore, predominantly studied the heuristics of the automatic system in everyday decision making. Our study examines the role of slow deliberation for experts who exhibit superior decision-making outco...

Interdisciplinary deliberative research has grown tremendously over the last decade. Theorists are attending more carefully to the findings of empirical research. And empiricists are framing their research in ways that are tailored to track normative-theoretical concerns. The recent surge in empirical work on deliberation, however, has led to a huge proliferation of research designs, general me...

Humans often cooperate with strangers, despite the costs involved. A long tradition of theoretical modeling has sought ultimate evolutionary explanations for this seemingly altruistic behavior. More recently, an entirely separate body of experimental work has begun to investigate cooperation's proximate cognitive underpinnings using a dual-process framework: Is deliberative self-control necessa...

We study the e¤ects of deliberation on collective decisions. In a series of experiments, we vary groups’preference distributions (between common and con‡icting interests) and the institutions by which decisions are reached (simple majority, two-thirds majority, and unanimity). When deliberation is prohibited, di¤erent institutions generate signi…cantly di¤erent outcomes, tracking the theoretica...

This paper describes and analyses distinct patterns of 'governance conversation' observed in interactions on a discussion list that aims to support local, direct, governance in a geographically colocated community in South Africa. Although each pattern relates to governance, making 'binding decisions', which has been seen as a key attribute of deliberative democratic processes, is almost entire...

An individual planning agent does not generally have sufficient computational resources at its disposal to produce an optimal plan in a complex domain, as deliberation itself requires and consumes scarce resources. This problem is further exacerbated in a distributed planning context in which multiple, heterogeneous agents must expend a portion of their resource allotment on communication, nego...

In most real-world settings, due to limited time or other resources, an agent cannot perform all potentially useful deliberation and information gathering actions. This leads to the metareasoning problem of selecting such actions. Decision-theoretic methods for metareasoning have been studied in AI, but there are few theoretical results on the complexity of metareasoning. We derive hardness res...