Through an analysis of information systems in medical communities – notably the development of the International Classification of Diseases and the design of a Nursing Interventions Classification scheme – we argue that community systems designers necessarily build for multiple social worlds simultaneously. So doing, we argue, they make a series of significant social and political choices. We d...

For centuries cross-cultural comparisons have contributed to attempts to understand human behavior (Herodotus being an often-quoted early example). Specialized journals for publishing cross-cultural psychological studies have been in existence for less than 20 years, however. The founding of the International Journal of Psychology took place in 1966. The first Annual Review article on culture a...

An ethical issue is an identifiable situation and also an opportunity which requires an individual or organization to choose from the actions that must be evaluated as right or wrong, ethical or unethical, etc. Product– related ethical issues arise when marketers fail to disclose the risks associated with a product. In pricing, common ethical issues are price fixing or failure to disclose the f...

We explore the case for monopolistic price flexibility in a linear setting. With different marginal costs, by changing the production mix price differentiation can improve welfare and also aggregate consumer surplus even if total output does not increase (as in the linear case). This depends on the variability of cost and demand parameters, and on their correlation. We also show that the welfar...

Article history: Received 18 January 2009 Received in revised form 23 May 2009 Accepted 28 May 2009 A new classification scheme for the impact analysis based on an impact matrix is presented. In contrast to the state-of-the-art methods the impact factors of a social system are not grouped into 4 or 5 groups but ranked according to different criteria. The criteria include for instance the drivin...

The recent advancement of agent-based modeling and simulation has been revolutionizing the social sciences, and the expectations are rising in social sciences. In the current state in the study of simulating agentbased economic models, however, there are some problems, as follows, that need to be resolved: (1) absence of integrated environment to support a whole research process, (2) difficulty...

We consider the comparison of Epistemic Frames as an example of a visual comparison problem. Epistemic Frames (also known as Epistemic Networks) are a representation used by Learning Scientists to encode the state of one’s knowledge about a domain. The data consist of association strengths between a set of concepts, which can be thought of as edge weights of an undirected graph. The important t...

Comparison shopping sites facilitate consumers’ pre-purchase evaluation of alternatives, and draw increasing traffic to merchants’ Web sites. As the main source of revenue, sponsored link advertising has become one of the most important aspects for comparison shopping services. However, little is known about the effectiveness of sponsored links and their effects on consumers’ information proces...

Three studies show that different forms of self-activation have differential influences on the processing of social comparison information. Activating neutral self-conceptions results in defensive processing of threatening social comparison information (Study 1). Participants maintain favorable self-evaluations in the face of upward comparison and rate the upward target of comparison negatively...

Social comparison-the tendency to self-evaluate by comparing ourselves to others-is an important source of competitive behavior. We propose a new model that distinguishes between individual and situational factors that increase social comparison and thus lead to a range of competitive attitudes and behavior. Individual factors are those that vary from person to person: the relevance of the perf...