Collective Decision-making Process Research Articles

Structured to Succeed? Strategy Dynamics in Engineering Systems Design and Their Effect on Collective Performance

Abstract Strategy dynamics are hypothesized to be a structural factor of interactive multi-actor design problems that influence collective performance and behaviors of design actors. Using a bi-level model of collective decision processes based on design optimization and strategy selection, we formulate a series of two-actor parameter design tasks that exhibit four strategy dynamics (harmony, coexistence, bistability, and defection) associated with low and high levels of structural fear and greed. In these tasks, design actor pairs work collectively to maximize their individual values while managing the trade-offs between aligning with or deviating from a mutually beneficial collective strategy. Results from a human subject design experiment indicate cognizant actors generally follow normative predictions for some strategy dynamics (harmony and coexistence) but not strictly for others (bistability and defection). Cumulative link model regression analysis shows that a greed factor contributing to strategy dynamics has a stronger effect on collective efficiency and equality of individual outcomes compared to a fear factor. Results of this study provide an initial description of strategy dynamics in engineering design and help to frame future work to mitigate potential unfavorable effects of their underlying strategy dynamics through social constructs or mechanism design.

Value Co-Creation and Distribution: A Contingency View on the Effects of Financial Slack

This study develops a theoretical perspective on inclusive processes of value co-creation and distribution contingent on the financial slack in the organizational system. By focusing on the economic and institutional costs of slack, as well as on its benefits to support economic exchanges with social dimensions, we propose an inverted U-shaped relationship between slack and the co-created value. We preview our argument by analyzing how slack sustained a collective decision-making process to plan a new national railway, albeit the dubitable social gains of the solutions achieved by consensus. We then draw on organization governance literature using new institutional economics to theorize empirical observables, and probe the slack-value relationship with a game theoretic model that holds constant the essence of the governance arrangement. We show the value-slack relationship is moderated by the accrual of benefits from a negotiated settlement: if the benefits are low, the co-created value is maximized by increasing slack up to the point that maximizes the capital provider’s share of value. If the benefits are high, the co-created value is maximized by increasing slack even more so as to maximize the enfranchised stakeholders’ share of value. We also show that, up to a point, increased slack widens the space of mutually acceptable solutions. Also, the effect of slack is steeper if the costs of slack can be reduced by making credible commitments today to mobilize more resources tomorrow.

Application of grey clusters in the development of a Synthetic Model of the goals of Polish family enterprises' successors

PurposeThe knowledge of goals of the successor, who is preparing to take over the business, is extremely important for the succession process and further operation of a family enterprise. The aim of this study is to structure the goals of Polish family enterprises’ successors and to develop a Synthetic Model of the goals of Polish family enterprises' successors with the application of grey clustering evaluation models.Design/methodology/approachResearch into the specifics of the diagnosis and assessment of the goals set for the successors of the first succession in family businesses in Poland was carried out in the third quarter of 2016 at two stages using two research methods: in-depth group interview and individual interview. The main aim of the first stage was the extraction of subjectively identified goals by family enterprises' successors (based on their succession experience). The statements were open and obtained during two in-depth group interviews (2 FGI) with successors being in the process of succession at its various stages (total, n = 14). The respondents presented their experiences connected with the succession process along with emotions that are associated with it. In one of the interview stages, the respondents were asked to enumerate their individual goals they set for themselves in the context of upcoming changes. Next, the group agreed on the most frequently mentioned goals by creating their verbal interpretation. The obtained list of 20 goals was recorded and discussed, and thanks to the application of the elimination rule in the collective decision-making process, that list was reduced to 10 goals, which was approved by all participating successors.FindingsThe results show the developed Synthetic Model of the goals of family enterprises’ successors. The study singled out four groups of successors: (1) successors who do not work in the family enterprise yet, (2) successors holding lower-level positions, (3) successors holding managerial positions, (4) successors who manage the entire company. As a result of the calculations, the developed Synthetic Model of the goals of family enterprises' successors was positively verified for successors working in higher-level positions and successors managing the entire family enterprise.Research limitations/implicationsIn order to use the results of clustering, e.g. for conducting studies on large samples with the use of statistical tools, a reduced number of goals should be taken into account. A thorough study of three goals may bring results similar to the study of the original ten successors of Polish family enterprises in the process of succession. The aim of future research is to develop a mathematical model using optimization functions that enable selection of elements representing individual clusters in such a way that it leads to the extraction of the elements with the highest value in relation to the accepted criterion for assessing their value.Originality/valueIn the future, conducting family business research in accordance with the developed methodology requires a look at the proposed list of successor goals obtained during the Focus Group Interview (FGI) as it could be shortened using the Cluster of Grey Incidence method. Shortening the list of goals has its analytic and practical justifications. The study of the full list of goals in subsequent (and numerous further studies) could lead to errors related to, for example, different interpretation of goals among the investigated successors. Furthermore, the full list of goals would increase costs and extend research time.

Entrepreneurial innovative network and the design of socio-economic neural system

This article aims to establish how an idea becomes an innovation and how creativity, collective dynamics, and information are interconnected. The results of the study showed that the emergence of innovations is closely connected with collective collaboration, and that it is impossible outside of group dynamics. The process of self-organization and collective decision-making is realized through a synergistic interaction, which then transforms into the so-called “information laser” and serves as a basis for the emergence of innovation. Both individuals (as persons and as separate entrepreneurs) are the elements of the innovation system and the actors of the artificial neural network–socio-economic neural systems (SENS-systems). These systems act through self-organization and corporate collaboration, and the efforts of each element are amplified through the interaction with the other elements. The model of the SENS-systems can explain how the individual idea transforms into innovation and spreads throughout the world.

Understanding the Meaning of Representation in a Deliberative Democratic Governance System

The meaning and nature of athlete representation in sport governance is broad and goes beyond formalistic delegate models and voting rights accounts. This article explores the meaning and nature of representation in the context of intercollegiate sport governance. Interviews were conducted with intercollegiate athlete representatives and athlete representative administrative advisors to gain an understanding of how and why athlete representatives carried out their roles. Findings revealed that the meaning and motivations of athlete representation were based on the institutionalized deliberative democratic governance system. Representation meant standing and acting for the power of the athlete voice and having the capacity to generate the athlete voice into legislation and decision making. The performative role of representatives involved self-accountability, where they accepted responsibility to engage in a deliberative process of collective decision making. Implications for practice and future research on athlete representation in a deliberative democratic sport governance system are presented.

Disadvantaged youth’s participation in collective decision making

This study examines the fulfillment of disadvantaged youth’s participation rights in collective decision making. It was conducted in participatory frameworks operating under the auspices of a municipality in Israel that implemented a national program aiming to improve the living conditions of children and at-risk youth. The qualitative research design was based on semi-structured interviews conducted with nine youth at risk, aged 16–18, who had participated in collective decision-making processes and with 10 adults who facilitated these participation processes or held senior administrative positions. The findings showed that disadvantaged youth’s participation in collective decision making is encumbered by unique barriers relating to parents’ livelihood challenges, the absence of family support, difficulties in persevering and in complying with timetables, a derogatory attitude expressed by adults not involved in the facilitation process, and youth’s apprehension regarding these attitudes. Factors surmounting these barriers included relational participation, allowing the participants a sense of belonging; adapted participation, based on flexibility and mediation; and counter participation, which stands as a positive alternative to being marginalized at school. The findings also showed that the influence of the youth’s participation encompassed various collective and personal domains, including the ways it transformed the social construction of the youth. The conclusions are grounded in Foucault’s writings on heterotopia (1967). This conceptualization highlights the dual role of the examined participation as an other space for the youth, which provided them with hegemonic cultural capital and narratives, but was also intertwined with their daily lives in their urban environment context.

ENDÜSTRİYEL SATIN ALMA SORUMLULARININ RASYONEL OLMAYAN KURUMSAL SATIN ALMA DAVRANIŞINA YÖNELİK BİR ÖLÇEK ÇALIŞMASI

Marketing activities are running through suppliers to producers as well as producers to end-users. Basically, industrial buying decision-makers seem like institutions, but they are all real people in practice, and they cannot be expected to be rational every time. Thus, this study aims to understand the motives of such irrational decisions and form a scale for evaluating industrial buyers' irrational buying decisions. For achieving this, qualitative data collected by applying semi-structured interviews based on the literature. Then a draft survey form has been established and sent to industrial buying professionals. Frequency, factor, and reliability analysis have been applied to the collected data, and the final form of the questionnaire has been achieved, consisting of 18 questions and five dimensions with 0,857 Cronbach’s Alpha value and 64,714% total variance explained. It can also be said that most irrational buying decisions are made by a collective decision-making process in buying centers.

Participación en la escuela: Una utopía no tan lejana. Una propuesta enmarcada en el sistema educativo español

La sociedad actual valora cada vez más los procesos de decisión colectiva y requiere una ciudadanía más participativa. Sin embargo, esta ciudadanía no siempre cuenta con las herramientas formativas necesarias para que la participación sea real y efectiva, lo que hace que sea fundamental potenciar la cultura participativa desde la escuela. El documento realiza, en primer lugar, un breve estudio de los conceptos de participación y participación infantil, así como del estado de la protección legal de esta última y de los principales modelos existentes para su medición, la escalera de Roger Hart y la propuesta de Novella y Trilla. Se propone, a continuación, una secuencia de actividades para ser desarrolladas por el alumnado de 6º de educación primaria del sistema educativo español durante un curso académico. Con la propuesta, flexible y adaptable a otros cursos de educación primaria o al primer ciclo de educación secundaria del mismo sistema educativo, se pretende potenciar, de un modo ordenado y sistemático, las competencias participativas del alumnado dotándolo, así, de herramientas concretas para su participación social y ciudadana presente y futura.

Phase transitions, collective emotions and decision-making problem in heterogeneous social systems

The paper considers the problem of collective decision-making as a second order phase-transition, which occurs in heterogeneous information-oriented communities possessing frequent information exchange between individuals. We examine the quantum-like model of simplified two-level cognitive systems (TLCS) interacting with a socially important (contextual) information field. The model exploits approaches to the modern social cohesion framework. We refer to some target network community, which is in close interaction (e.g. message exchange) with “reservour” (large network community) possessing infinite degree of freedom. We introduce a new approach for valence and arousal variables, used in cognitive sciences for the description of collective emotion states. We express them via collective polarization and population imbalance respectively. The model predicts a super-radiant phase transition for target network community leading to coherent polarization establishment in the socium. The valence and arousal parameters can be evaluated from actrors behaviour in social network communities as a result of immediate response (decision-making) to some notable news. We introduce Gaussian and Levy distribution functions to reveal the influence of social community inhomogeneity on decision-making features. We show that a critical (social) temperature is determined by the population imbalance (valence), detuning, field coupling strength parameter and relay to conditions of social polarization establishment. We predict coherent social energy release in a community without inversion due to its specific properties close to the superfluid paradigm in quantum physics, or social cohesion in sociology. We establish a connection of our model to the recently presented quantum-like model of the social laser to describe the waves of social protests as the result of collective decision-making process in the system with inversion of population in mental states. Finally, we compare our model with existing social impact models, a.k.a. cellular automata models, in the limit when social community perceives information field in the state induced by large information reservoir (mass-media). Notably, eliminating quantized field we lose important information how collective emotions (arousal) form in social community.

Applying Social Choice Theory to Solve Engineering Multi-objective Optimization Problems

Multi-objective optimization problems usually do not have a single unique optimal solution, for either discrete or continuous domains. Furthermore, there are usually many possible available algorithms for solving these problems, and one typically does not know in advance which of these will be the most effective for solving a particular problem instance. Hyper-heuristics (HHs) are often used as a means to make this choice. In particular, the underlying idea of HHs is to run several algorithms or heuristics and dynamically decide, based on different criteria, which problem or part of the problem should be solved by which algorithm or heuristic. On the other hand, the domain of social choice theory studies how to design collective decision processes by aggregating individual inputs into collective ones. In this paper, we explore the use of social choice theory in creating HHs. By using HHs based on different voting methods, like Borda, Copeland and Kemeny–Young, we show how we can solve both continuous and discrete engineering multi-objective optimization problems and discuss the results obtained by each of these methods. Our obtained results show that our strategy has found solutions that are at least equals to the ones generated by the best algorithm among the studied ones, and sometimes even overcomes these results.

Transnational Corporations of Football Kin: Migration, Labor Flow, and the American Samoa MIRAB Economy

In the U.S. territory of American Samoa, gridiron football has emerged as an important driver of a stock-flow relationship in which the stock of overseas-resident migrant athletic laborers sustains the flow of remittances to their extended family in their homeland. Within this article, I consider the significance of gridiron football within American Samoa’s MIRAB ( Migration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy) economy, a model of Pacific Island microeconomies characterized by migration, remittances, foreign aid, and public bureaucracy. Based on a series of personal interviews with high school football players between the ages of 15 and 18 years on the Eastern football team squad, as well as more than a dozen coaches, parents, educator, and directors associated with the production of American Samoan High School football ( n = 60), I critically examine the social, cultural, and economic determinants involved in the collective decision-making process of footballers to emigrate to the U.S. mainland. I find that family units in the American Samoa operate as, to rephrase Bertram and Watters, transnational corporations of football kin, working collectively to develop and train skilled football laborers toward the accumulation of various forms of economic and social remittances for the benefit of the individual and extended family unit. More broadly, gridiron football in American Samoa produces a stock-flow relationship whereby a stock of Samoan gridiron footballers migrates to U.S. colleges and universities to support the flow of remittances and aid that sustains the island’s MIRAB economy.

UN-CODE: Software for Structuring and Visualizing Collective Decision-Making Based on Qualitative Data

UN-CODE is a web-based tool for structuring and visualizing collective decision-making processes using qualitative, case-based data. It offers a database management tool and visualization method in one. The structure of the database and the visualizations derive from a model that is rooted in evolutionary biology and that has been transformed for social scientists. It features three principal dimensions: problem and solution definitions (PSD), weighted connectedness (c_score) as a network measure, and fitness (FIT) to describe the probability of actors reaching their goals in the collective decision-making process. The results are visualized in a scalable 3D-environment that shows the main dynamics of such in one quick overview. Funding statement: This research has been funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research research grant no. 451-10-022.

Design Thinking, Collaborative Innovation, and Neoliberal Disappointment: Cruel Optimism in the History and Future of Higher Education

The extensive amount of academic labor of minoritized faculty, especially at research institutions, has been well documented in the academic literature. Three tenured associate professors at The University of Texas present the genesis, evolution, and postscript of leading and serving in an initiative to de-silo and encourage collaboration across the university, culminating in a collaboratively taught course. Integrating concepts of teaching in the neoliberal university context, the gendered and raced distribution of academic labor, and slow scholarship, the authors discuss the pedagogically productive process of collective teaching and decision-making, the frustrations inherent when employing radical pedagogy, and institutional shifts that prioritize a customer-service model of teaching, learning, and rapid research productivity. The authors conclude with reflections and recommendations for scholar-researchers similarly placed in institutional contexts where encroachments upon academic freedom and an embrace of business models collide with personal goals of career satisfaction, collective work, and improving pedagogy.

Active Preference Learning Based on Generalized Gini Functions: Application to the Multiagent Knapsack Problem

We consider the problem of actively eliciting preferences from a Decision Maker supervising a collective decision process in the context of fair multiagent combinatorial optimization. Individual preferences are supposed to be known and represented by linear utility functions defined on a combinatorial domain and the social utility is defined as a generalized Gini Social evaluation Function (GSF) for the sake of fairness. The GSF is a non-linear aggregation function parameterized by weighting coefficients which allow a fine control of the equity requirement in the aggregation of individual utilities. The paper focuses on the elicitation of these weights by active learning in the context of the fair multiagent knapsack problem. We introduce and compare several incremental decision procedures interleaving an adaptive preference elicitation procedure with a combinatorial optimization algorithm to determine a GSF-optimal solution. We establish an upper bound on the number of queries and provide numerical tests to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Striving for a Societal Perspective: A Framework for Economic Evaluations When Costs and Effects Fall on Multiple Sectors and Decision Makers.

In most societies, resources are distributed by individuals acting in markets and by governments through some form of collective decision-making process. Economic evaluation offers a set of tools to inform collective decisions by examining the resource requirements and outcomes of alternative policies. The ‘societal perspective’ has been advocated, but less consideration has been given to what this should include and its practical implementation. This paper presents a framework for economic evaluation of policies with costs and outcomes falling on different sectors (e.g. health, criminal justice, education) and involving different decision makers. It extends the ‘impact inventory’ developed by the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine by considering all affected individuals and reflecting how outcomes attributed to an intervention can be compared with outcomes forgone as a result of resources not being available for other purposes. The framework sets out the series of assessments to be made, distinguishing points at which value judgements feed into the evaluation, and the implications of alternative judgements. These assessments reflect the institutional arrangements of public bodies, for example, their funding, the outcomes they consider important and their relative valuations of these outcomes. By avoiding the use of an abstract ‘societal perspective’, the contribution of the framework is to inform multiple decision makers with different objectives and provide practical guidance on overall societal impact.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40258-019-00481-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Urban adaptation to climate change: Climate services for supporting collaborative planning

There is a mounting international interest about how to address the implications of climate change for urban areas. The availability and sharing of “good” knowledge and information is a key prerequisite for a successful planning in cities. Urban planning for adaptation is largely considered as a collective process. This raises the importance of the availability/usability of proper “planner/user friendly” interfaces to interpret and translate the available information into adaptation decisions, and to facilitate the information sharing and collaborative decision making within the interaction network in which the different actors are embedded. Nevertheless, collaborative planning is far from being the standard in urban adaptation. The activities carried out in EU-MACS aimed at detecting and analysing the main barriers hampering the process. To this aim, Problem Structuring Methods and Social Network Analysis were implemented. The evidences collected in an urban case study – i.e. Helsinki – demonstrated that ambiguity in problem understanding and information needs, and missing connections in the mechanisms of interaction among actors-resources-tasks could hamper the effectiveness of collaborative planning and create inefficient flow between information production and decision process. Starting from these premises, and referring to the results of an extensive literature review about existing tools, our research aimed at facilitating the use of climate services to enable the collective decision-making process.

PENGAMBILAN KEPUTUSAN SECARA KOLEKTIF OLEH PIMPINAN KPK BERDASARKAN PASAL 21 AYAT (5) UNDANG-UNDANG NOMOR 30 TAHUN 2002 TENTANG KOMISI PEMBERANTASAN KORUPSI

Article 21 paragraph (5) of the Corruption Eradication Commission Law states that the Chairperson of the Corruption Eradication Commission works collectively, which in the explanation stated that each decision making must be approved and decided together. The main problem of this research is about the pre-trial case of Budi Gunawan which was determined the suspect the KPK in the arguments of the petitioner's petition stating that the suspect's determination was not carried out collectively because at that time there was a vacancy of one of the KPK Leaders. Therefore this study aims to examine and examine the decision-making process the KPK Leaders as the application of Article 21 paragraph (5) of the KPK Law and also determine the scope of tasks that are collectively decided and agreed upon together. This study uses a normative juridical method. The research specifications used are descriptive analytical, using a statute-approach approach, conceptual approach and comparative approach. The results of the study can be summarized as follows: First, the collective decision-making process is carried out in the form of ordinary mechanisms, formal mechanisms and urgent mechanisms. With the decision making procedure carried out deliberation to reach consensus and use the most votes (voting) as stated in Commission Regulation No. 3 of 2009 concerning the procedures for decision making the KPK leadership, but in the provisions of Article 7 PK / 3/2009 formulate that decision making can be carried out in less than 3 (three) people (not fulfilling the quorum) in the event of an urgent situation, and meaning the collective by the KPK is not always interpreted as making decisions in its entirety (the five leaders), then the provision overrides the actual collective meaning based on the principle of working collectively. Second, as for the scope of the collective decision-making tasks the KPK Leaders regulated in Article 3 CHAPTER III LEADERSHIP Regulation No. 1 of 2015 concerning the Organization and Work Procedure of the KPK, it is stated that the increase in the status of suspects is the scope of tasks decided and agreed collectively with expose procedure. Keywords: komisi pemberatasan korupsi, pengambilan keputusan, keputusan kolektif

Using information technology for understanding of collective decision-making processes by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine

The article is devoted to the problem of assessing the influence of parliamentary fractions, which allows to determine which political forces are making biggest influence on the state cybernetic security. The method of automated data collection and processing on the basis of open voting results collected from the official parliament web-resource is proposed. The collection and processing of information for the system of monitoring the activities of legislatures of different countries should be based on the principles of Big Data, where the main ones are: data processing speed in accordance with their growth; scalability of solutions; processing both structured and semi-structured data such as data from legislatures web-sites. The method of impact assessments calculation, which takes into account the mutual preferences of the voting participants using the rank of the indexes of the match of positions by voting, is proposed. Software using the capabilities of the Java language have been developed, which allows to calculate the classical and modified Shapley-Shubik indices, split threshold value, position matching index, fraction effectiveness index, and to perform correlation analysis of the results. The corresponding calculations were made for the fractions of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of VIII convocation in period from December 2014 to July 2018. Using correlation analysis, the interaction between fractions and the trends in their fractional discipline were determined. There are trends in the interaction at shorter time intervals, which are not noticeable at longer time intervals. It has been found that some fractions exceed their potential influence in parliament due to the high threshold of the split, which indicates a good fractional discipline. On the contrary, the low threshold of split and the impossibility of realizing winning coalitions negatively influence the effectiveness of the fractions' work. The results allow to assess the coherence and effectiveness of the fractions work, which are a necessary for obtaining agreed solutions in the field of national and cybernetic security of the state.

A practice-based approach to collective decision-making in pricing

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze price decision-making through a practice-based approach. The paper investigates the micro-level practices used to arrive at sales price decisions. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a qualitative study approach is used to develop findings abductively. The data are gathered through an in-depth case study at two firms: semi-structured interviews, meeting observations, shadowing and pricing documents. Findings This paper finds that pricing is a collective decision-making process involving multiple actors across the organization. The case firms work on solving information, coordination and control problems to arrive at sales prices by enacting interlinked practices. Pricing is therefore neither a structure nor a single decision but a process consisting of multiple micro-level practices that enable firms to make pricing decisions. Originality/value This paper develops a practice-based approach to pricing that conceptualize the micro-level practices used to to make pricing decisions in the face of information, coordination and control problems. The paper is interdisciplinary and adds to the accounting literature and the market literature, which have tended to study pricing as a decision made by one decision maker, and not as an organizational process where multiple actors share, evaluate, interpret and coordinate information and decisions.

The Neglected Pieces of Designing Collective Decision-Making Processes.

Autonomous decision-making is a fundamental requirement for the intelligent behavior of individual agents and systems. For artificial systems, one of the key design prerequisites is providing the system with the ability to make proper decisions. Current literature on collective artificial systems designs decision-making mechanisms inspired mostly by the successful natural systems. Nevertheless, most of the approaches focus on voting mechanisms and miss other fundamental aspects. In this paper, we aim to draw attention to the missed pieces for the design of efficient collective decision-making, mainly information processes in its two types of stimuli and options set.