Ambiguous Decision Research Articles

A PDCA based approach to evaluate green supply chain management performance under fuzzy environment

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel plan-do-check-act (PDCA) based group decision making model to evaluate the GSCM performance of manufacturing organizations. This research employs an integrated fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach in which the fuzzy-analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) method determines criteria weights and the fuzzy-technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (FTOPSIS) method ranks the organizations. Five qualitative criteria are selected from the extant literature, which encompass both environmental, operational, and economic aspects of sustainability. Data is collected by developing a questionnaire, establishing a decision-makers’ committee, and carrying out a survey. To illustrate the industrial application of the proposed model, this study considers a real-world case study in the Indian manufacturing sector, in which three organizations (Organization A, Organization B, and Organization C) are selected from three distinct industrial segments, namely the leather industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the steel industry, respectively. The result reveals that the environmental impact of harmful substances released from production is the most influential parameter. The result also reveals that Organization C is the benchmark organization and its strategies can guide other organizations for GSCM performance improvement. Moreover, the proposed model is capable of handling vagueness and ambiguity in decisions.

The role of the state in influencing work conditions in China's internet industry: Policy, evidence, and implications for industrial relations

While there is growing scholarly interest in work conditions in China's internet industry, many studies have focused exclusively on corporate employment relations strategies. By contrast, the article demonstrates the Chinese government's significant role in shaping the collective work experience in business reality. Drawing on three months of fieldwork in China, the findings suggest that the state's quest for technology supremacy has resulted in internet companies that compete ferociously, which in turn causes extreme working hours and burnout. The censorship of online labour activism and the ambiguity in court decisions also lower the interest of tech workers in organising and defending their labour rights. This study opens up an evidence-based debate on industrial relations in contemporary China and calls for more discussions on the state's role in shaping worker well-being and protection.

Pythagorean fuzzy DEMATEL method for supplier selection in sustainable supply chain management

The fuzzy DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method is one of the accepted decision-making methods in uncertain environment. The Pythagorean fuzzy set is a generalized concept of fuzzy set and intuitionistic fuzzy set. In this paper, we develop the Pythagorean fuzzy set based DEMATEL method and apply it to solve the supplier selection problem in sustainable supply chain management. We consider the Pythagorean fuzzy set for handling uncertain and incomplete information while selecting the criteria of a supplier and dealing with ambiguity of human decisions. Considering the independence of the criteria, we put forward the proposed method which gives mutual relationships among the criteria, and identifies cause–effect components of the system. The proposed method is illustrated numerically based on data collected from a group of professional personnel.

Assessment of Course Outcomes Attainment using Confidence Limits

Course Outcomes (CO) assessment is one of the most important components of Outcome Based Education (OBE) to describe the specific type and level of learning students. The programs must have an effective end results in every course and their systematic assessment with proper documentation and should evaluate continuously to establish certain standards leading to program accreditation. In the calculation of CO attainment, the mean values are usually considered as a target values but it may create ambiguity in decision making. The target value in conventional method is unbounded on the upper and lower ends, which undermines interpretations of student's category associated with their performance. In this paper an attempt has been made with a new approach for calculation of CO attainments based on Lower Confidence Limit (LCL) and Upper Confidence Limit (UCL) and compared against conventional method. This comparison has shown that the proposed method showed a nontrivial improvement over existing conventional method and found more flexible, relatively well behaved, and applicable to a wide range of students' categories. Further, proposed method has the advantage of being useful in framing appropriate syllabi of courses and in making effective strategy to improve students' performance. Keywords: Outcome Based Education, Lower Confidence Limit, Upper Confidence Limit, Attainment of Course Outcome

Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism

Disastrous Discretion: Ambiguous Decision Situations Foster Political Favoritism

Orphan Implementations of Public Policy for Conflict-Oriented Issues

This paper aims to broaden our understanding of public policy characterized by issues of non-consensus. The idea of flexible, independent administrative decision-making for a conflict-oriented policy-type is addressed in terms of chronological constructions of policy process. Distributions of limited resources are a source of public contention likely to draw ambiguous high-level policy decisions that lack practical administrative directives. Conflicting institutional, professional and stakeholder influences, at various levels of policy processes, illuminate circumstances fostering implementations incongruent with politically motivated macro-declarations. Yet, this does not necessarily represent failed policy. A reevaluation of administrative systems, by critical deconstruction of the dominant top-down discourse, provides a frame of reference for valid divergent implementations. A conceptual progression from field-level interpretation and adaptation of macro policy, initiatory orphan implementations emerge as policy itself. This revised bottom-up modality of the policy process implies a working balance of combined outputs, providing equitable outcome to serve largescale public interest.

The Hardest Weeks of My Life: A Qualitative Study of Experiences, Practice Changes, and Emotional Burden of New York City Oncology Physicians During the COVID-19 Surge in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic surge in New York City in Spring 2020 resulted in an unprecedented constraint on health care resources. This study aimed to explore the experiences of doctors providing care to oncology patients during this time. Hospitalists and medical oncologists from two large inpatient services at a dedicated cancer center participated in virtual in-depth interviews exploring how the pandemic affected their practice and to what extent it may have affected decisions for urgent evaluation or hospital admission, interventions, or goals-of-care discussions. Interviews also explored how the pandemic affected each individual physician's psychologic well-being. Transcripts were analyzed by three independent coders in Atlas.ti v. 7.5, using a thematic analysis approach. Eighteen physicians were interviewed (n = 6 GI medical oncologists, n = 6 gynecologic medical oncologists, and n = 6 hospitalists). Analysis identified five major themes related to fear and distress: (1) perceived patient fears of the hospital during COVID-19, leading to avoidance and delay of acute care needs before admission, (2) physicians' fear and distress delivering oncology care during COVID-19, (3) physician distress resulting from ambiguity in decision making, (4) distress and anxiety balancing the need for patient contact with the need to minimize infection risk, and (5) distress regarding impact of uncertainty and acuity of COVID-19 on goals-of-care discussions. Insight into the experiences of physicians providing cancer care during a COVID-19 surge underscores the need for strategies mitigate short-term distress and long-term psychologic impacts. Findings can also inform practitioner training and preparedness for future pandemics in the oncology setting.

Fear increases likelihood of seeking decisional support from others when making decisions involving ambiguity

AbstractIndividuals often turn to others for decision‐making advice, which has the potential to improve decision‐making outcomes when advice is drawn from a reliable source. Because seeking advice is a kind of information seeking, it is likelier to occur when decisions involve ambiguity or when full information about outcomes is unavailable. We examined whether experimentally induced incidental fear, known to increase information seeking, increased intentions to seek decision‐making advice and whether this effect was stronger for decisions involving ambiguity. In Study 1, fear increased the likelihood of seeking advice about an ambiguous decision in which both options carried some risk, compared to neutral emotion (and anger). In Study 2, a 2 (emotion) by 2 (minimal vs. extensive information) design, fear increased the likelihood of seeking advice about palliative care only after a simple definition of palliative care (minimal information), but not after more comprehensive (extensive) information about its nature, benefits, and efficacy. These findings suggest that incidental fear may encourage people to seek advice about decisions involving ambiguity or when full information to make the decision is not available.

Optimisation of maintenance in delivery systems for cytostatic medicines

BackgroundThe real-world application of maintenance in organisations brings together a number of maintenance policies in order to achieve the desired availability, efficiency and profitability. However, the literature mostly chooses a single maintenance policy, and so the decision process is not suited to the real conditions in the company to which it is applied. Our study takes a combination of maintenance policies as alternatives, and so conforms to the actual practice of maintenance in organisations. Furthermore, it introduces the possibility of including extra spare parts, or outsourcing maintenance policies. Although the selection of maintenance policies has been applied to many kinds of business and of machine, there is almost no instance of its application to hospitals, and it has never been applied to delivery systems for cytostatic drugs.MethodsThe model uses the fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), which is recognised as being highly suitable for solving group decision-making problems in a fuzzy environment. Fuzzy set theory is also considered to be more proficient than crisp numbers for handling the ambiguity, imprecisions, data scarcity, and uncertainty inherent in decisions made by human beings. The judgements required were obtained from a decision group comprising the heads of facilities maintenance, maintenance of medical equipment, health and safety at work, environment, and programming-admission. The group also included care staff; specifically, the heads of the main clinical services, and the medical supervisors. The model includes original criteria, such as Quality of health care, which measures impact on care as a function of mean availability of each alternative. It also considers Impact on hospital management via the criteria: Working environment in the organisation and Impact on health care; the former criterion measures equality among care services in the hospital, while the latter assesses the effect on regional health cover. The model was built using real data obtained from a state hospital in Spain. The model can also be easily applied to other national and international healthcare organisations, providing weights specific to the criteria. These are produced by a decision group from each healthcare organisation and the alternatives are updated in accordance with what is considered important in each hospital.ResultsThe results obtained from the model recommend changing the alternative that is currently in use, Corrective and Preventive Maintenance, to Corrective and Preventive Maintenance plus two spare hoods. This alternative would lead to an availability of 1 (the highest possible) in the systems for preparing personalised cytotoxic drugs, and so the quality of service is therefore very high. Additionally, it could offer services to all the users of the hospital, and also offer cover in the preparation of cytotoxic medicines to other hospitals in the catchment area.ConclusionsThe results suggest the possibility that improvements to the support and logistical systems, which include maintenance, traditionally held to have no effect on quality of care, may be key to improving care quality, but also in reducing risk to patients, care and non-care staff, and the environment.

Court’s modification of category of gravity of the committed offence and implementation of compulsory measures set by the Article 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: problems of theory, legislative regulation, and law enforcement

Leaning on the analysis of the provisions of current legislation, clarification of the supreme judicial authority, scientific doctrine, case law materials and statistics, this article explores the implementation of compulsory measures set by the Article 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, after court’s modification of the category of gravity of the committed offence in accordance with the Part 6 of the Article 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The goal of this research lies in assessment from the perspective of the theory of criminal law of such specific procedure for implementation of disciplinary compulsory measures and herding to closed-type special institution, as well as identification of possible flaws and contradictions that may cause problems and ambiguous decisions in law enforcement practice. Attention is given to the existing contradictions between the provisions of criminal law and criminal procedure law, explanations of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, as well as legislative gaps and problems emerging in law enforcement practice in the context of provision set by the Article 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in accordance with the Part 6 of Article 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Taking into account the sequence, grounds and conditions established by the legislator in the Part 6 of the Article 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for the use of the latter, the conclusion is made on impossibility to apply compulsory educational measures in line with this norm. The article also substantiates the position infeasibility of preliminary imposition of penalty (de lege ferenda) on release of such with implementation of compulsory measures set by Part 1 and 2 of the Article 92 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The author also offers to supplement and rectify certain provisions of the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation No. 10 of May 15, 2018.

What patent practitioners can learn from Nalpropion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Actavis Laboratories FL, Inc.

In its Nalpropion Pharms., Inc.v.Actavis Labs. FL, Inc. decision, the US Federal Circuit provided a narrow window for satisfying the requirement for written description of a patent claim through an ‘equivalent disclosure’.1 During the course of examination of a patent application, Nalpropion v.Actavis may allow a patent prosecutor to argue for the allowability of a claim when there would otherwise be insufficient written description in the application as filed. Similarly, counsel for a plaintiff asserting a patent in litigation may be able to draw on Nalpropion to support the validity of a claim. However, the limitations on when an ‘equivalent disclosure’ may be used to satisfy the written description requirement and the ambiguities in the Nalpropion decision highlight the importance of ensuring that sufficient explicit written description supporting the claims is included when preparing a patent application, including fully defining each claim element within the claim...

Problematic social media use is associated with the evaluation of both risk and ambiguity during decision making.

Background and aimsPeople can engage in excessive, maladaptive use of social media platforms. This problematic social media use mirrors substance use disorders with regard to symptoms and certain behavioral situations. For example, individuals with substance use disorders demonstrate aberrations in risk evaluations during decision making, and initial research on problematic social media use has revealed similar findings. However, these results concerning problematic social media use have been clouded by tasks that involve learning and that lack a clear demarcation between risky and ambiguous decision making. Therefore, we set out to specifically determine the relationship between problematic social media use and decision making under both risk and ambiguity, in the absence of learning.MethodsWe assessed each participant's (N = 90) self-reported level of problematic social media use. We then had them perform the wheel of fortune task, which has participants make choices between a sure option or either a risky or ambiguous gamble. In this way, the task isolates decisions made under risk and ambiguity, and avoids trial-to-trial learning. Results: We found that the greater an individual's problematic social media use, the more often that individual choses high-risk gambles or ambiguous gambles, regardless of the degree of ambiguity.Discussion and conclusionsOur findings indicate that greater problematic social media use is related to a greater affinity for high-risk situations and overall ambiguity. These findings have implications for the field, specifically clarifying and extending the extant literature, as well as providing future avenues for research.

Job Stress and Burnout among Social Workers in the VUCA World of COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper aimed to explore the changes posed by the new COVID-19 pandemic to the field of social work and its impact on social workers in terms of job stress and burnout in Romania. Two conceptual models were used to frame the discussion: the theoretical framework of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) to discuss the challenges that the unprecedented context of the COVID-19 pandemic has created for social workers; and the Job Demands and Resources model (JD-R) to understand job demands perceived as stressors and burnout. Based on convergent mixed methods, the study sample consisted of 83 social workers employed in statutory and private social services in Romania, from different areas of intervention. Results showed that social workers perceived a high level of job stress related to work during the pandemic, which was associated with higher levels of burnout in the areas of personal burnout (average score 55.9) and work-related burnout (average score 52.5). Client-related burnout was lower (average score 38.4), indicating that stress was generated mainly by organisational factors and work-related factors (workload, aligning to new legislative rules and decisions, inconsistency, instability, ambiguity of managerial decisions, and lack of clarity of working procedures) and less by client-related stressors (lack of direct contact with clients, risk of contamination, managing beneficiaries’ fears, and difficulties related to technology). High job demands and limited job resources (managerial and supervisory support, financial resources, and recognition and reward) led to a high to very high level of work-related burnout for 15.7% and an upper-medium level for 44.2% of respondents. A group of 27.7% reported lower to medium levels of work-related burnout, while 14.5% had very low levels, managing to handle stress factors in a healthy manner. Study results pointed to the importance of organisational support and the development of a self-care plan that help to protect against job stress and burnout. Recommendations were made, putting forward the voice of fieldworkers and managers fostering initiatives and the application of sustainability-based measures and activities designed to deal with the challenges of the VUCA environment.

Hierarchical integrated machine learning model for predicting flight departure delays and duration in series

Flight delays may propagate through the entire aviation network and are becoming an important research topic. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical integrated machine learning model for predicting flight departure delays and duration in series rather than in parallel to avoid ambiguity in decision making. The paper analyses the proposed model using various machine learning algorithms in combination with different sampling techniques. The highly noisy, unbalanced, dispersed, and skewed historical high dimensional data provided by an international airline operating in Hong Kong was used to demonstrate the practical application of the model. The result shows that for a 4-h forecast horizon, a constructive neural network machine learning algorithm with the Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique-Tomek Links (SMOTETomek) sampling technique was able to achieve better average balanced recall accuracies of 65.5%, 61.5%, 59% for classifying delay status and predicting delay duration at thresholds of 60 min and 30 min, respectively. Similarly, for minority labels, the precision-recall and area under the curve showed that the proposed model achieved better results of 32.44% and 35.14% compared to the parallel model of 26.43% and 21.02% for thresholds of 60 min and 30 min, respectively. The effect of different sampling techniques, sampling approaches, and estimation mechanisms on prediction performance is also studied.

Optimal Fall Protection System Selection Using a Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Construction Sites

Construction falls are a leading cause of fatalities in almost every construction industry around the globe, and fall protection systems are the key measures to ensure the safety of labor crews. This study develops a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making model integrating analytical hierarchy process, fuzzy set theory and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution approach to analyze the overall performance of various fall protection plans for construction projects, which focuses on evaluation and selection of the appropriate protection plan considering the most influential safety, productivity, and economy factors. Results show that the optimal plan can be effectively identified and determined among all potential alternatives. Besides, the model overcomes the shortcoming of weight value uncertainty and ambiguous decision information through membership function calculations. As a result, it provides guidance for the improvement of construction performance, intending to minimize fall risks, improve labor productivity, and save economical cost on the jobsites.

Моделювання в сфері вантажних перевезень: амбівалентність управлінських рішень в умовах карантинних обмежень та економічної конкуренції

The study focuses on the ambiguity of management decisions in conditions of economic competition and quarantine restrictions. It is concluded that in the field of freight transportation there are antagonistic interests of the environment in the process of making management decisions by managers of JSC “Ukrzaliznytsia”. The classification of information situations related to the uncertainty of the environment is used, according to which the fifth information situation most closely corresponds to the current situation in the market of transport services. The choice of the fifth information situation is due to the factors caused by the government’s decisions to impose quarantine restrictions. Most of these factors have had a negative impact on the expectations of businesses in general and cargo owners in particular. The state of economic competition in the field of freight transportation was studied by analyzing the structure of goods by different modes of transport for January-November 2019-2020, indicating the absence of significant changes or restrictions on freight traffic. Thus, quarantine restrictions did not cause irreparable damage to the railway industry directly, but they indirectly affected a number of indicators. Analysis of economic competition, level of uncertainty, degree of ambivalence of government decisions and structural and dynamic analysis of the market of transport services in January-November 2019-2020, allowed creating a methodology that ensures the validity of management decisions in economic competition and ambivalence of government actions. It consists of 6 stages: formulation of the purpose; formation of the corresponding information base; formation of an expert group; direct survey; selection of the most promising solutions for stabilizing the situation in the field of rail freight; assessment of the homogeneity of the expert group. The application of this technique gives railway companies additional competitive advantages, even in conditions of growing uncertainty and risk.

Hypoactivation in the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex during ambiguous decision making in individuals with HIV.

People with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often have neurocognitive impairment. People with HIV make riskier decisions when the outcome probabilities are known, and have abnormal neural architecture underlying risky decision making. However, ambiguous decision making, when the outcome probabilities are unknown, is more common in daily life, but the neural architecture underlying ambiguous decision making in people with HIV is unknown. Eighteen people with HIV and 20 controls completed a decision making task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Participants chose between a certain reward and uncertain reward with a known (risky) or unknown (ambiguous) probability of winning. There were three levels of risk: high, medium, and low. Ambiguous > risky brain activity was compared between groups. Ambiguous > risky brain activity was correlated with emotional/psychiatric functioning in people with HIV. Both groups were similarly ambiguity-averse. People with HIV were more risk-averse than controls and chose the high-risk uncertain option less often. People with HIV had hypoactivity in the precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and fusiform gyrus during ambiguous > medium risk decision making. Ambiguous > medium risk brain activity was negatively correlated with emotional/psychiatric functioning in individuals with HIV. To make ambiguous decisions, people with HIV underrecruit key regions of the default mode network, which are thought to integrate internally and externally derived information to come to a decision. These regions and related cognitive processes may be candidates for interventions to improve decision-making outcomes in people with HIV.

Body in the face of uncertainty: The role of autonomic arousal and interoception in decision-making under risk and ambiguity.

Influential theories posit that bodily responses are important for decision-making under uncertainty. However, the evidence of the role of our ability to perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) in decision-making under uncertainty is mixed. These differences may arise from the fact that uncertainty, a part of daily decision-making, can be fractionated into risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Here we examine the role of arousal and interoception in shaping risky and ambiguous decisions. We measured skin conductance responses and heart rate changes while participants (N=40) made gambling decisions in the context of risky and ambiguous lotteries. Results reveal that the anticipation phase produced the largest arousal responses, suggesting that the anticipation is a major contributor to arousal during gambling behavior, regardless of the uncertainty type. Moreover, physiological responses were higher following positive outcomes than negative outcomes. We did not find any direct relation between interoceptive dimensions and the attitudes toward risk and ambiguity. However, in those with higher interoceptive accuracy, skin conductance responses differentiated between risk and ambiguity as well as between the gamble phases (decision, anticipation, and outcome). Together, our findings demonstrate that decision-making under uncertainty is to some extent associated with individual differences in the ability both to generate and to perceive accurately subtle changes in bodily arousal during the decision-making process. However, these changes seem to be moderately related to the type of uncertainty (risk or ambiguity).

Robustness of Central Composite Design and Modified Central Composite Design to a Missing Observation for Non-Standard Models

Missing observations in an experimental design may lead to ambiguity in decision making thereby bringing an experiment to disrepute. Robustness, therefore, enables a process, not to break down in the presence of missing observations. This work constructed a modified central composite design (MCCD) from a four-variable central composite design (CCD) augmented with four center points using the leverage of a hat-matrix. The robustness of the CCD and MCCD were assessed when a design point is missing at the factorial, axial, and center points of the experiment, for a non-standard model, using the loss criterion, D-optimality, D-efficiency, and relative D-efficiency. When the designs are complete the MCCD shows higher D-efficiency and D-optimality for the non-standard model when compared to the CCD. In the absence of an observation from any of the designs, the CCD is found to be a more robust and efficient design compared to the MCCD as it has overall lower loss values at all the factors levels.

Semi-automated weak annotation for deep neural network skin thickness measurement.

Correctly calculating skin stiffness with ultrasound shear wave elastography techniques requires an accurate measurement of skin thickness. We developed and compared two algorithms, a thresholding method and a deep learning method, to measure skin thickness on ultrasound images. Here, we also present a framework for weakly annotating an unlabeled dataset in a time-effective manner to train the deep neural network. Segmentation labels for training were proposed using the thresholding method and validated with visual inspection by a human expert reader. We reduced decision ambiguity by only inspecting segmentations at the center A-line. This weak annotation approach facilitated validation of over 1000 segmentation labels in 2 hours. A lightweight deep neural network that segments entire 2D images was designed and trained on this weakly-labeled dataset. Averaged over six folds of cross-validation, segmentation accuracy was 57% for the thresholding method and 78% for the neural network. In particular, the network was better at finding the distal skin margin, which is the primary challenge for skin segmentation. Both algorithms have been made publicly available to aid future applications in skin characterization and elastography.