Collective Decision-making Process Research Articles

International Real Estate Review

Condominium reconstruction involves a difficult collective decision-making process among owners, which prevents older condominiums from being redeveloped efficiently. This paper aims to examine whether this type of collective action cost exists for Japanese condominiums. First, we discuss in the literature review and an empirical analysis that the number of units in a condominium complex is an appropriate proxy for the collective action problem. Then, by using the rent in the price function to control for housing characteristics, we show that the number of units has a negative impact on condominium price. Furthermore, the price function for condominiums is compared with that for single-owner rental apartments that are free from the collective action problem. The estimation results show that the number of units only negatively affects the price of condominiums and that the depreciation rate for the condominium price is greater than that for single-owner apartments. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that a significant cost is associated with collective action problems in condominium reconstruction. Lastly, we conduct a comparative examination of condominiums in Japan and the United States, and the result suggests that revising the current Japanese condominium law could induce more efficient redevelopment of old condominiums.

Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay

The paper examines conditions under which communities threatened by armed groups amid the Colombian civil war are most likely to resist displacement. Using a game-theoretic framework and quantitative data, the paper shows that the threatened communities which expect rescue from an armed actor are more likely to resist displacement than those communities which expect no help. Community cohesion has a dual effect on displacement. The amount of peer support among community members reduces their chances to resist displacement, but the extent to which community members are involved in collective decision-making processes makes them less likely to displace. These findings reveal that both displaced communities and those that resisted displacement possess crucial social resources for their post-conflict recovery and development, such as cohesion and strong bonds of solidarity. The paper stresses the importance of local-level organisation coordinating collective decision-making to guarantee the most efficient use of these resources.

Collective decision making in the red dwarf honeybee Apis florea: do the bees simply follow the flowers?

Most studies on collective decision making in honeybees have been performed on the cavity-nesting Western honeybee, Apis mellifera. In more recent years, the open-nesting red dwarf honeybee Apis florea has been developed as a model organism of collective decision making in the context of nest-site selection. These studies have shown that the specifics of the species’ nest-site requirements affect collective decision making. In particular, when potential nesting sites are abundant, as is the case in A. florea, the process of collective decision making can be simplified. Here, we ask if A. florea simply follows the availability of floral resources in their environment when deciding on an area to move into. We determined the locations danced for by three colonies the day before, of and after reproductive swarming. Our results suggest that colonies of A. florea indeed track the availability of forage in their environment and that swarms move in the general direction of forage rather than towards a specific nest site.

Mental Models Analysis and Comparison Based on Fuzzy Rules: A Case Study of the Protests of June and July 2013 in Brazil

Collective decision processes involve a large number of decision makers, demanding the consensus of different points of view about problems of several knowledge areas. The analysis and comparison of these points of view can contribute to this consensus, but they depend on the representation of each decision maker's individual knowledge about the problem. Mental models (MMs) are diagrammatic artifacts based on natural language which can be used to represent such knowledge. These models comprise logical cause-effect loops that are used to describe a problem as understood by each decision maker. This paper proposes an innovative tool based on a knowledge-based system of fuzzy rules which identifies MMs that best represent the consensus about the causes of a specific problem. Fuzzy rules were created, taking into account both, qualitative and quantitative variables. The tool was applied to the analysis and comparison of MMs of university students to describe the protests that occurred in Brazil between June and July 2013. A comparison of results using Pareto analysis indicated that the tool identifies those MMs that best indicate the probable causes of the protests.

Parents’ decision on child labour and school attendance: evidence from Iranian households

In the framework of a household’s collective decision processes, this study presents a structural empirical model to test the hypothesis that child labour is compelled by household’s poverty and parent’s bargaining power against one another. To this end, a measure for mother’s intra-household bargaining power is developed. I use Iranian Household’s Income and Expenditures Surveys (2005 and 2010). Estimation method used in this study is multinomial logit. Findings indicate that household’s poverty is not the sole cause of child’s work incidence. Instead, given the other factors such as poverty, being the first born, local labour market prospect and gender fixed, mother’s bargaining power is found as a significant determinant of child’s work and school attendance. However, the magnitude of its marginal effects vary by gender and across geographical areas.

Communal Participation in Payment for Environmental Services (PES): Unpacking the Collective Decision to Enroll.

Payment for Environmental Service programs are increasingly applied in communal settings where resource users collectively join the program and agree to limit their shared use of a common-property resource. Who decides to join PES and the degree to which community members agree with the collective decision is critical for the success of said programs. Yet, we have limited understanding of the factors that influence communal participation and the collective decision process. This paper examines communal participation in a national payment for conservation program in Ecuador. We use quantitative and qualitative analysis to (i) identify the attributes of the communities that participate (or not), and factors that facilitate participation (n = 67), and (ii) assess household preference and alignment with the collective decision to participate (n = 212). Household participation preferences indicate varying degrees of consensus with the collective decision to participate, with those using the resource less likely to support participation. At the communal level, however, our results indicate that over time, those communities that depend more heavily on their resource systems may ultimately choose to participate. Our findings suggest that communal governance structures and outside organizations may be instrumental in gaining participation in resource-dependent communities and building consensus. Findings also point to the need for further research on communal decision-processes to ensure that the collective decision is based on an informed and democratic process.

Analyzing Social Roles Based on a Hierarchical Model and Data Mining for Collective Decision-Making Support

With the popularity of social networking services (SNSs) and the increase of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in terms of the recommendation of personalized services and the collective decision-making process. Usually, in an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among the whole users, and most of the users' opinions may be multifarious. In this paper, we focus on analyzing and identifying users' dynamical social roles to facilitate the collective decision-making process. After introducing the social choice theory and an improved collective decision-making model, we present a three-layer model to analyze users' social roles in a hierarchical way and develop an integrated mechanism to utilize the identification of social roles to support the collective decision making. Based on a developed NetLogo-based tool, a case study for the course-offering determination with an application scenario is demonstrated to show the process of using users' social roles to support the collective decision making. The comparison experiment conducted between our method and the Delphi method shows the usefulness of our proposed method to help users achieve the decision consensus in a more efficient way.

Economists’ interest in collective decision after World War II: a history

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.

Variability in individual assessment behaviour and its implications for collective decision-making.

Self-organized systems of collective behaviour have been demonstrated in a number of group-living organisms. There is, however, less research relating to how variation in individual assessments may facilitate group decision-making. Here, we investigate this using the decentralized system of collective nest choice behaviour employed by the ant Temnothorax albipennis, combining experimental results with computational modelling. In experiments, isolated workers of this species were allowed to investigate new nest sites of differing quality, and it was found that for any given nest quality, there was wide variation among individuals in the durations that they spent within each nest site. Additionally, individual workers were consistent in spending more time in nest sites of higher quality, and less time in those of lower quality. Hence, the time spent in a new nest site must have included an assessment of nest quality. As nest site visit durations (henceforth termed assessment durations) are linked to recruitment, it is possible that the variability we observed may influence the collective decision-making process of colonies. Thus, we explored this further using a computational model of nest site selection, and found that heterogeneous nest assessments conferred a number of potential benefits. Furthermore, our experiments showed that nest quality assessments were flexible, being influenced by experience of prior options. Our findings help to elucidate the potential mechanisms underlying group behaviour, and highlight the importance of heterogeneity among individuals, rather than precise calibration, in shaping collective decision-making.

When Policy Hits Practice: Structure, Agency, and Power in South African Water Governance

ABSTRACTA new water governance framework with the aim of overcoming past racial inequalities in water access and addressing the critical challenges of water security in the country was developed by the post-Apartheid South African government in the years following 1994. The adoption of ideas of collaborative governance and institutional devolution associated with integrated water resources management (IWRM) are central to this framework. Using social theory, this study examines structural and agential dimensions of power manifested during the establishment process of a water user association in the Northwest Province of South Africa. Portraying that the establishment process of this new institution was flawed due to power asymmetries of interacting actors, this article unmasks supposedly collective decision-making processes in collaborative water governance. As the establishment of water user associations in South Africa is an ongoing political process, our findings have societal relevance for the country’s future water policy implementation.

ICT in Health and Finance Global Governance Institutions

This working paper suggest that most global governance institutions in health and finance have developed online services to increase their transparency and efficiency. In other words, these organizations increase the capacity of their members and selected stakeholders to access information, build capacity and take part in decisions. Based on the very nature of ICTs, it is possible to conclude new ICTs have a positive impact on the capacity of marginalized actors to participate in global governance. Through internet and online platforms, marginalized actors take part in multiple participative debates and soft regulation instruments that can enrich or divert the production of public legitimacy. They take part in multiple forums, open debates and collective decision-making processes that enhance information sharing and capacity building.

Sociopolitical contexts for addiction recovery: Anexos in U.S. Latino communities

BackgroundAnexos are community-based recovery houses that were created in Mexico to serve people struggling with addiction to alcohol and other drugs. Brought to the U.S. by Mexican migrants, anexos provide residential care to primarily male Latino migrants and immigrants who are unable or unwilling to access formal treatment. While some Mexican anexos have come under fire for coercion, confrontational treatment methods, and corporal punishment, little is known about treatment practices in U.S. anexos. MethodsWe conducted a two-year ethnographic study of three anexos in urban Northern California. The study included over 150h of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 42 residents, 3 directors, 2 assistant directors, and 3 former directors (N=50). Qualitative data were analyzed thematically using ATLAS.ti software. ResultsThe anexos in our study differed in important ways from Mexican anexos described in the scientific literature. First, we found no evidence of corporal punishment or coercive internment. Second, the anexos were open, allowing residents to leave the premises for work and other approved activities. Third, the anexos were self-supported through residents’ financial contributions. Fourth, collective decision-making processes observed in the California anexos more closely resembled sober living houses than their authoritarian counterparts in Mexico. ConclusionAnexos may operate differently in the U.S. versus Mexico due to variations in sociopolitical context. This exploratory study suggests that anexos are addressing unmet need for addiction treatment in U.S. Latino immigrant and migrant communities. As a community-created, self-sustained, culturally appropriate recovery resource, anexos provide important insights into Latino migrants’ and immigrants’ experiences with substance abuse, help-seeking trajectories, and treatment needs.

Оценка распределения влияния между политическими группами в Европейском парламенте в 1979-2014 гг.

The author analyzes the power distribution among political groups in the European Parliament from 1979 till 2014. Agent’s voting power is treated as the capability to influence the result of collective decision-making process. Often the voting power is not equal to votes share the agent possess. We obtain the values of classical and modified power indices for European political groups and compare their performance. The Banzhaf power index is employed to measure European political groups’ a priori power that does not impose any restrictions on coalition formation, and power indices that take into account groups’ preferences in coalition formation in order to measure actual voting power. Classical power indices are calculated using only votes’ distribution in the committee and a quota to pass a decision. Pairwise preferences allow to have respect to different willingness of groups to form a single coalition. In this paper preferences are modeled using the roll-call data from the votings on important issues of European politics. The less popular is the MP’s position, the smaller is the number of coalitions she can enter and the less is the voting power. We demonstrate that factions can exploit their position and acquire higher relative power than both share of seats and the Banzhaf index measures, and the Liberal group of the European Parliament forming coalitions with both partners from the left and the right is the case. Conversely, hard restrictions on formation of coalitions due to ideological differences can lead to less actual voting power than a priori.

Interplay between polarisation and plurality in a decision-making process with continuous opinions

.By considering that the stance held by an individual in a collective decision-making process is intimately related to a quantifiable trait of personality, we study the impact of different sorts of inhomogeneity—namely, polarisation (partisanship) and plurality—of that trait among the population on the final collective stance.It is shown that, although both situations represent forms of diversity in the system, each one is associated with a different type of emergence of consensus that herein we define as a nontrivial collective stance. Specifically, we verify that plurality only relates to a continuous emergence of nontrivial stances, whereas for given degrees of partisanship a discontinuous transition can be observed. That discontinuity implies the existence of a latent heterogeneity in the system; latent in the sense that it is unable to enhance the decrease in the cost of assuming the trivial collective stance over a nontrivial stance.Moreover, in bringing forth the existence of a discontinuous transition—and hence of metastable states of consensus—it is possible to adjust partisanship and heterogeneity in the group so that, by increasing the diversity of the relevant trait to the problem, the system can move from trivial to nontrivial stances. Such effect ultimately assigns to diversity, namely polarisation, a counter-intuitive role of consensus provider.

A Cooperação Sul-Sul em saúde, segundo organismos internacionais, sob a perspectiva da bioética crítica

RESUMO A Cooperação Sul-Sul em saúde apresenta-se como alternativa ao caráter assistencialista e de transferência de tecnologias que marca o antigo modelo Norte-Sul. As ações dela decorrentes têm uma dimensão ética evidente, já que envolvem alocação de recursos, relações interculturais, compartilhamento de biotecnologias e processos decisórios coletivos. No presente ensaio, é apresentado o modelo de bioética crítica a partir do qual se analisam três importantes documentos internacionais contendo diretrizes para a Cooperação Sul-Sul, com vistas a compreender em que medida favorecem a construção de programas estruturantes e emancipatórios.

The cellular Ising model: a framework for phase transitions in multicellular environments.

Inspired by the Ising model, we introduce a gene regulatory network that induces a phase transition that coordinates robustly the behaviour of cell ensembles. The building blocks of the design are the so-called toggle switch interfaced with two quorum sensing modules, Las and Lux. We show that as a function of the transport rate of signalling molecules across the cell membrane the population undergoes a spontaneous symmetry breaking from cells individually switching their phenotypes to a global collective phenotypic organization. By characterizing the critical behaviour, we reveal some properties, such as phenotypic memory and hypersensitivity, with relevance in the field of synthetic biology. We argue that our results can be extrapolated to other multicellular systems and be a generic framework for collective decision-making processes.

ANALYZING COALITIONS IN CHINA'S POLICY FORMULATION: REFORMING THE ROLE OF STATE-OWNED ENTERPRISES IN CHINA'S ENERGY SECTOR

AbstractWe focus on the elite decision-making process in China, analyzing the formation of coalitions around particular policy options. We apply a framework that simulates collective decision-making processes (CDMP): the KAPSARC Toolkit for Behavioral Analysis (KTAB). KTAB facilitates the application of a Spatial Model of Politics, an open source model similar to Bueno de Mesquita's (1997) Expected Utility Model and the Senturion model (Abdollahian, et al 2006). KTAB provides a framework to understand logical consequences of subjective data inputs, enabling contrasting scenarios to be analyzed. We examine the interactions of actors' interests that drive China to reform its energy sector policies, in particular the structure of the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). In the case of private companies' entry into energy markets in China, we find that little reform is likely. The inertia of key actors holds back the potential for a significant opening of the energy sector. Despite the erosion of CNPC's political clout, there is little consensus for major reform to China's market position.

System for Malicious Node Detection in IPv6-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

The trend of implementing the IPv6 into wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has recently occurred as a consequence of a tendency of their integration with other types of IP-based networks. The paper deals with the security aspects of these IPv6-based WSNs. A brief analysis of security threats and attacks which are present in the IPv6-based WSN is given. The solution to an adaptive distributed system for malicious node detection in the IPv6-based WSN is proposed. The proposed intrusion detection system is based on distributed algorithms and a collective decision-making process. It introduces an innovative concept of probability estimation for malicious behaviour of sensor nodes. The proposed system is implemented and tested through several different scenarios in three different network topologies. Finally, the performed analysis showed that the proposed system is energy efficient and has a good capability to detect malicious nodes.

Economists' Interest in Collective Decision After World War II: A History

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.

Intersectoral Mobilization in Child Development: An Outcome Assessment of the Survey of the School Readiness of Montreal Children

In 2006, the department of public health in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, conducted the Survey of the School Readiness of Montreal Children. After unveiling the results in February 2008, it launched an appeal for intersectoral mobilization. This article documents the chain of events in the collective decision-making process that fostered ownership of the survey results and involvement in action. It also documents the impacts of those findings on intersectoral action and the organization of early childhood services four years later. The results show that the survey served as a catalyst for intersectoral action as reflected in the increased size and strength of the actor network and the formalization of the highly-anticipated collaboration between school and early childhood networks. Actors have made abundant use of survey results in planning and justifying the continuation of projects or implementation of new ones. A notable outcome, in all territories, has been the development of both transition-to-kindergarten tools and literacy activities. The portrait drawn by the research raises significant issues for public planning while serving as a reminder of the importance of intersectoral mobilization in providing support for multiple trajectories of child preschool development.