This paper considers the role of reasons and arguments in the making of decisions. It is proposed that, when faced with the need to choose, decision makers often seek and construct reasons in order to resolve the conflict and justify their choice, to themselves and to others. Experiments that explore and manipulate the role of reasons are reviewed, and other decision studies are interpreted fro...

This paper discusses how interpersonal conflict between IS developers and clients can disrupt IS projects. It is suggested how potential problems can be avoided by getting the ‘soft’ factors right which can lead to improvements in information systems development (ISD) processes. However little is being done in most organisations to review success from this perspective. Measurement of ISD qualit...

Luanne Lohr and Lynn R. Harvey Michigan State University Conflict over property rights is certainly not a new topic. Conflicts arise because individuals or groups expressing different preferences claim rights to the same good, whether that good be an acre of land or a cubic foot of air. The agricultural sector, once the basis for the dominant lifestyle in the United States, has more recently cl...

We describe mechanisms for automated evolution of ontologies to adapt to new circumstances and to make them better suited to the given task. If a conflict is detected between the original theory and new experimental evidence, a repair is required to resolve the inconsistency and to recover from failure. The rules for conflict diagnosis and transformation of the ontologies are composed together ...

Conflicts exist in multi-agent systems. Agents have different interests and desires. Agents also hold different beliefs and may make different assumptions. To resolve conflicts, agents need to better convey information between each other and facilitate fair negotiations that yield jointly agreeable outcomes. In this paper, we present a two-agent conflict resolution scheme developed under Assump...

Recent evidence for separate forms of attention for different visual attributes seems to conflict with Duncan's "integrated competition" theory of visual attention. To resolve this conflict, we established attention-operating characteristics for four pairs of visual discriminations. While one task was common to every pair, the other tasks were different and concerned different visual attributes...

J Michael Wynne is a retired surgeon who has spent over 15 years following the changes from a predominantly not-for-profit to a for-profit health care system in the USA and Australia. This article explores how two conflicting patterns of thinking, for-profit and notfor-profit currently influence Australian health care. It describes the differences between these two patterns and how people resol...

Since its beginning in 1987, researchers and policymakers have touted the US Environmental Protection Agency National Estuary program (NEP) as one of the leading examples of collaborative institutions designed to resolve conflict and build cooperation at the watershed level. Using the NEP as an example, I summarize the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative institutions. Using data gathe...