The implementation of knowledge management (KM) involves innovation and reformation for organizations. KM implementation requires not only a substantial investment, but also changes the organization culture and structure. Before embarking on KM, thorough planning is crucial to ensure the implementation achieves the intended objectives of accruing profit and enhancing competitiveness for organis...

Foraging animals typically encounter opportunities that they either pursue or skip, but occasionally meet several alternatives simultaneously. Behavioural ecologists predict preferences using absolute properties of each option, while decision theorists focus on relative evaluations at the time of choice. We use European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) to integrate ecological reasoning with decisio...

Decisions about preservation, protection, or development of environmental “commodities” like ground water, atmospheric visibility, open space, wildlife, wetlands, and forests are often made without good information about the value of preservation relative to the cost. Clearly, the economic cost of preservation is often substantial. The cost of preserving wildlife habitat, for example, often tot...

The ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF) plays a role in decision making, but its precise function remains unclear. Several lines of evidence suggest that VMF is involved in representing the economic value of options. A prior study from our lab has shown that patients with lesions to the VMF are less consistent than controls in making simple preference judgments between stimuli presented in pairs. H...

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) offer a powerful approach for the description and resolution of cooperative multi-agent problems. In such model a group of agents coordinate their actions to optimize a global objective function, taking into account their preferences and constraints. A core limitation of this model is the assumption that all agents’ preferences are specified ...

products or services, planning a trip, or scheduling resources, people increasingly rely on computerized product recommender systems (also called product search tools) to find outcomes that best satisfy their needs and preferences. However, automated decision systems cannot effectively search the space of possible solutions without an accurate model of a user’s preferences. Preference acquisiti...

There are two key components to constructing summary measures of population health quality: a health-status classification system and a valuation function. The former was discussed in part 7. My remarks on that session are also relevant here (see chapter 7.2). The latter will be the focus of my brief remarks here. I will concentrate on three major topics: a conceptual foundation that supports a...

wide variety of AI applications, addressing the preference bottleneck is vital. Specifically, since the ability to make reasonable decisions on behalf of a user depends on that user’s preferences over outcomes in the domain in question, AI systems must assess or estimate these preferences before making decisions. Designing effective preference assessment techniques to incorporate such user-spec...

1 Motivation and introduction The key feature that makes combinatorial auctions (CAs) most appealing is the ability for bidders to express complex preferences over collections of items, involving complementarity and substitutability. It is this generality that makes providing the input to a CA extremely difficult for bidders. In effect, each bidder must provide her valuation function over the s...

This paper examines the determinants of the choice of financial advisors and their impact on the announcement effects of US acquirers in cross-border M&As. Two hypotheses are tested: one pertains to the acquiring firms’ home preference in selecting financial advisors, and the other relates to advisors’ experience in target countries. Evidence supports the home preference hypothesis in the selec...