There is a paucity of experimental data addressing how peers influence adolescent risk-taking. Here, we examined peer effects on risky decision-making in adults and adolescents using a virtual social context that enabled experimental control over the peer "interactions." 40 adolescents (age 11-18) and 28 adults (age 20-38) completed a risk-taking (Wheel of Fortune) task under four conditions: i...

Risk management has become increasingly politicized and contentious. Polarized views, controversy, and conflict have become pervasive. Research has begun to provide a new perspective on this problem by demonstrating the complexity of the concept "risk" and the inadequacies of the traditional view of risk assessment as a purely scientific enterprise. This paper argues that danger is real, but ri...

BACKGROUND Risk for developing metabolic syndrome (MeS) after delivery is high among women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), but little is known about development of MeS among women with risk factors for GDM during pregnancy. In the present study, we studied the prevalence of MeS 7 years postpartum among women with GDM risk factors during pregnancy, women with early GDM diagnosis and wo...

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) models make preference decisions over multiple attributes’ alternatives available, which in most of the cases conflict among themselves. On the other hand, the classic MCDM model assumes that the decision maker has a pre-defined fixed set of criteria, when taking a decision, and is presented with a clear picture of all available alternatives. This classi...

Similar to single user decisions, group decisions can be affected by decision biases. In this paper we analyze anchoring effects as a specific type of decision bias in the context of group decision scenarios. On the basis of the results of a user study in the domain of software requirements prioritization we discuss results regarding the optimal time when preference information of other users s...

I develop a novel model of team/committee decision making in which communication is costly in two directions: agents must pay costs to send messages to one another, but also to receive messages sent by others. Agents are heterogeneous only in the quality of the information they possess, and preferences are directly aligned over outcomes. Equilibrium strategies are intuitively characterized by a...

We propose modeling Group Support System (GSS) search tasks with Genetic Algorithms. Using explicit mathematical models for Genetic Algorithms (GAs), we show how to estimate the underlying GA parameters from an observed GSS solution path. Once these parameters are estimated, they may be related to GSS variables such as group composition and membership, leadership presence, the specific GSS tool...