Final Choices Research Articles

Feelings about party leaders as a voter's heuristic – what happens when the leaders change? A note

Recent analyses of voting at British general elections deploy a valence theory according to which electors evaluate each party's performance and policies and vote accordingly. Many voters, however, avoid at least some of the effort involved in assembling and assessing information about parties' policies and instead use heuristics such as their feelings about the party leaders as major determinants of their decisions. When party leaders are changed, therefore, differences in voters' feelings about predecessor and successor could lead to changes in party choice. That argument is tested for the 2015 and 2017 British general elections in England, between which all three largest parties changed their leader, with results entirely consistent with the argument. In addition, there were significant changes in feelings about the new party leaders during the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, and these too were linked to final voting choices in the expected directions.

A window of cognition: Eyetracking the reasoning process in spatial beauty contest games

We study the reasoning process in an environment where final choices are well understood and the associated theory is procedural by introducing two-person beauty contest games played spatially on two-dimensional grid maps. Players choose locations and are rewarded by hitting targets dependent on opponents' choice locations. By tracking subjects' eye movements (lookups), we infer their reasoning process and classify subjects into various levels. More than a half of the subjects' classifications coincides with their classifications using final choices, supporting a literal interpretation of the level-k model for subject's reasoning process. Lookup analyses reveal that the center area is where most subjects initially look at. This sheds light on the level-0 belief. Moreover, learning lookups of a trial on average could increase payoffs of that trial and eliminates roughly 60% of the gap to empirical best response, indicating how valuable lookups can help predict choices.

An online survey to enhance the understanding of car drivers route choices

Abstract The increasing application of advanced behavioral choice models, reflecting the stochasticity of individuals’ preferences and the complex nature of human decision-making process, requires enhanced data collection methods to obtain detailed data without significantly increasing the respondent burden. In this study, we present the development and deployment of a general data collection framework adapted for behavioral route choice studies. The main objectives of the proposed framework are to observe drivers’ route choices, and to identify important factors, including observable attributes and latent behavioral traits, affecting those decisions. More specifically, the survey has been designed to reveal drivers’ consideration set of route alternatives from which they pick their final choices. The detailed analysis of survey’s response behavior will help improve the framework to gather travel data even more efficiently.

‘Difficult to imitate and impossible to equal’: Byron, Burns, Moore and the Packaging of National Song

In the early 1810s, just before embarking on his Hebrew Melodies project, Byron engaged in a correspondence with the Scottish song editor George Thomson (1757–1851). While Byron chose not to engage in Thomson’s commission to write lyrics for his collections of Irish and Welsh songs, Thomson nonetheless published a number of Byron’s extant lyrics across his collections over the succeeding decades. This article traces how this happened, looks at Thomson’s final editorial choices and presentations of Byron’s lyrics, and reflects on the role of Byron as national songster alongside Thomson’s most significant poetic contributor, Robert Burns, and Byron’s great singer/songwriter friend Thomas Moore.1

The impact of sold-out information on tourist choice decisions

ABSTRACTTravelers encounter sold-out situations when purchasing a vacation package during peak season. However, the influence of sold-out information has drawn little attention in tourism research. This study aims to understand the influences of sold-out products on travelers’ purchase intentions and final choices. To fulfill the research objective, 526 samples were collected by the online marketing firm in the United States. Results suggested that presenting information about sold-out products increases purchase intention toward a target product similar to the sold-out product, regardless of prior experience with a destination. Further discussions are provided in the main body of paper.

How objective and subjective knowledge affect insurance choices

This study investigates the effect of objective knowledge (OK) and subjective knowledge (SK) on real-life insurance choices, a non-trivial, information-rich choice task with no dominant option. Prior research has shown that OK and SK tend to be correlated, but that is not always the case. By using a novel approach to manipulate SK—which could be adapted by salespeople in real-world contexts—we ensured that levels of SK and OK were not always in accord. Clear patterns emerged showing an inverse relationship between SK and OK, and the number of problem-framing (or structuring)-related statements made, number of overall information processing operations performed and the time spent to reach a decision. Most of the extra effort expended by low SK/low OK individuals was spent framing the problem, not executing decision rules such as making attribute comparisons. Those with high OK were also less prone to misunderstanding product information. Whether high or low SK/OK, there were no differences in final choices, suggesting that neither group jumped to a simplifying choice heuristic. Instead, those low in knowledge compensated for this deficiency by taking more time framing the problem and reaching a thoughtful decision, a decision strategy that weakens the effect of branding.

Consumer decision-making for functional foods: insights from a qualitative study

PurposeThis study aims to examine functional foods, a relatively recent development in the food industry, from the perspective of consumer decision-making. It deals specifically with consumers’ attitudinal dispositions towards such products and seeks an overall comprehension of the elements of decision-making factors that precede their purchase.Design/methodology/approachThis exploratory work methodologically uses several elements of a grounded theoretical approach, in-depth interviews with consumers (and food industry experts) and, more importantly, the constant comparative method of analysis.FindingsThe analysis indicates that three levels of decision-making processing form consumers’ final functional food choices in either affirmative or negative ways. At the abstract level, consumers position functional foods within their food system. A “benefit negotiation” process acts as the central route of decision-making. Finally, during the “appraising” stage, a representation of each functional food is built. This representation should not be perceived as a rigid one as it can be influenced by personal characteristics, marketing activities and, more importantly, monetary considerations.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a decision-making framework that takes choice issues into consideration. It builds on (connecting and challenging) some of the existing consumer literature on functional foods. The findings indicate the dynamic nature of consumers’ decision-making which is shaped by motivational and other personal factors. The study identifies the concept of perceived efficacy of such foods, a concept discussed widely in previous literature, as a subordinate aspect when compared to consumers’ consumption motivation, perceived importance and perceptions of pricing. The paper discusses the implications for theory, research and practice.

Final Choices: Surveying Career Options

This article follows the 25 exemplar elementary, secondary English, and math teachers prepared in New Jersey's alternate route program (AR) or college-based programs (CB) through their 11th year. The article examines retention and attrition patterns, including moving from school to school or to education-related positions outside of K–12 classroom settings. The article presents data on teachers’ reasons for staying or leaving, including their career aspirations. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and the implications for teacher education.

Precondition for Integration: In Support of Stand-alone Social Science in Rangeland and Silvopastoral Research

Most agree that social and ecological approaches should be integrated to ensure sustainable management of natural resources. However, an analysis of the content of three problem-based journals shows that if social sciences are included at all, they are typically subservient to natural sciences, and that quantitative approaches are privileged. We argue that true integration is achievable only if natural sciences and social sciences are each robust and if they meet eye to eye. We call for more openness to stand-alone social science research in problem-based journals, especially to research using qualitative methods. We highlight the potential insights derived from studying decision makers at the microlevel: the pastoralists, farmers, ranchers, and foresters who make final management choices. We argue that publishing such qualitative social sciences promotes dialogue across disciplines, strengthens integration, and increases the real-world impact of research.

Are vent crab behavioral preferences adaptations for habitat choice?

Hydrothermal vent organisms are adapted to their extreme and patchily distributed habitats. They are expected to have evolved mechanisms that keep them in their specific habitation. Since little is known about the recruitment or habitat selection of HV organisms such as brachyurans, we examined the properties of several hydrothermal vent-associated cues on the behavior of the hydrothermal vent (HV) crab Xenograpsus testudinatus in the laboratory that were contrasted by the offering of non-vent cues. This crab species is endemic and dominates the vent fauna of Turtle Island off the NE coast of Taiwan. HV crabs were separately and in combination offered the following vent-specific cues: (1) sulfuric sediment, (3) air-bubbling, (4) elevated temperature, (5) dead settled zooplankton, (7) other crabs, and (8) shade. The non-vent-specific cues were: (2) quarz sediment, (6) dead fish, (8) light. These cues were provided on either side of a two-choice chamber. The movement of individual crabs was monitored: as initial and final choices, and as the proportion of time the crabs spent in each compartment (resident time). Cues were offered alone and no such cue as a control in the same set-up. Sulfuric sediments and dead fish were significantly more attractive to females, and other crabs irrespective of gender were significantly more attractive to males. When compared to expected distributions, crabs, irrespective of gender, significantly avoided light and tended to select other crabs, air-bubbling, sulfuric sediment, elevated temperature, dead fish, dead zooplankton, and quarz sediments in the order of decreasing importance. Data do not support the hypothesis that dead settled zooplankton was particularly attractive nor that the other gender was selected. A combination of several vent-associated cues (sulfuric sediment, elevated temperature, air-bubbling) facilitated the strongest attraction to the crabs as reflected by all response variables. The ‘first choice’ responses were always consistent with the side of the choice compartment in which they spent the longest amount of time (resident time), but not with the ‘final choice’ of crabs, suggesting that the ‘resident time’ in addition to their ‘first choice’ is more reliable than just the ‘final choice’. The present results provide the first indication that several vent-associated habitat cues function as attractors for HV crabs. Habitat choice is also reflected by crab larval distribution in the field which tend to stay near the bottom not to be carried away from their specific habitat.

Uncertainty in the Cognitive Processing of a Legal Scenario: A Process Study of Student Translators

This article describes a process oriented case study of student translators’ translation of a legal text from Danish into English. Generally, when students are asked to translate a complex legal text their reaction to some degree demonstrates lack of confi dence in their ability to perform successfully both as students and after graduation. On the basis of a think-aloud experiment involving four groups of students we focus on how they handle uncertainty in the translation process, and explore whether it is possible to point to factors that are likely to make students go about the task of legal translation with more confidence. Two parameters are focused on: the students’ access to tentative translation equivalents both at the syntactic and lexical levels and the nature of reflection or argumentation performed to support their final choices. The ultimate purpose of this study is pedagogical in that we hope to be able to point to focusing points that will help students in their learning process.

Validation of the Childhood Career Development Scale Among Italian Middle School Students

During early adolescence, individuals engage in exploring educational opportunities, beginning to develop a career identity, contemplate future careers, and make tentative career decisions. Choices made during this period may have a strong effect on one’s academic and career future, and in many countries, young adolescents must make important and sometimes final academic and career choices that impact the rest of their lives. Despite this, research on early adolescence is severely lacking. To address this gap, a validation study of the Childhood Career Development Scale (CCDS) was conducted with a young adolescent Italian sample. Consistent with previous research with younger samples, support was found for an eight-factor structure of the CCDS. Convergent validity was supported by positive associations with exploration, students’ ideas, attitudes, and behaviors regarding their academic and career future and career self-efficacy. These findings support Super’s dimensional model of childhood career development through early adolescence as originally theorized.

EU-ETS Phase IV: allowance prices, design choices and the market stability reserve

The final design choices for Phase IV (2021–2030) of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) are about to be made. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have all issued proposals for the rules governing Phase IV of the EU ETS. This article uses an analytically tractable simulation model of the EU ETS to project the proposals’ impacts on allowance price paths, the number of allowances banked for future use and the number of allowances stored in the market stability reserve (MSR), which will come into effect in 2019. The article finds that all three proposals have virtually the same impact on allowances prices during Phase IV. Price paths diverge between scenarios only in later decades. The analysis also makes it possible to identify how changes in key parameters impact on allowance price paths. Three parameters are investigated: the linear reduction factor (which reduces the annual cap on emissions by a constant amount every year), cancellation of allowances stored in the MSR and the intake rate of the MSR (specifying the amount of allowances withheld from auctions and placed in the MSR). They differ substantially in whether, how and when they affect allowance prices. Increasing the linear reduction factor increases price levels over the entire time horizon. Cancellation of allowances from the MSR increases prices mainly towards the middle of the century and doubling the intake rate of the MSR has no noticeable impact on price paths.Key policy insights:The impact on price paths of design choice proposals for Phase IV of the EU ETS by all three EU legislative bodies are almost identical.Compared to the status quo, the proposals raise prices owing to an increase in the linear reduction factor specifying by how much the number of allowances issued is reduced each year.Cancellation of allowances from the MSR substantially increase prices only after 2030.Doubling the rate at which allowances are transferred into the MSR has virtually no impact on price paths.

Modeling and Simulating the Empathetic Decision-Making Behavior in Social Networks with Homophily

People tend to associate with other people whose qualities are similar to their own. This phenomenon is the so-called “like attracting like”, or the “homophily”, in social networks. This paper presents a model that simulates how individuals in social networks with homophily make decisions as a result of the empathic effect, which refers to influence by the decisions of friends or the populations of social networks of which they are a member. In this study, experiments were conducted using Monte Carlo simulation to test a particular decision-making preference (such as asking a question in a Facebook group) and Chi-square tests were conducted to see whether the distribution of people’s final choices is the same as that of people’s intrinsic choices. Experimental results show that under each the following conditions, individuals are less likely to experience the empathic effect, meaning that they are less likely to change their intrinsic choices: (1) the social network exhibits a more homophily; (2) decision-makers have more options from which to choose, and (3) individuals have fewer friends.

Breaking down hierarchies of decision-making in primates.

Possible options in a decision often organize as a hierarchy of subdecisions. A recent study concluded that perceptual processes in primates mimic this hierarchical structure and perform subdecisions in parallel. We argue that a flat model that directly selects between final choices accounts more parsimoniously for the reported behavioral and neural data. Critically, a flat model is characterized by decision signals integrating evidence at different hierarchical levels, in agreement with neural recordings showing this integration in localized neural populations. Our results point to the role of experience for building integrated perceptual categories where sensory evidence is merged prior to decision.

An optimal evaluating method for uncertainty metrics in reliability based on uncertain data envelopment analysis

In reliability engineering, there always exist uncertainties caused by the scarcity of data and information. Various metrics are developed to measure reliability under uncertainty, including evidence-theory-based reliability, interval-analysis-based reliability, fuzzy-interval-analysis-based reliability, posbist reliability and belief reliability. As these five metrics are difficult to be fully understood, it is hard to select the most appropriate one for a specific condition. This paper will propose an uncertain evaluating model to conduct an objective evaluation on these uncertainty metrics. An evaluating index system is established from the aspects of capabilities and adaptabilities. Uncertainty theory is adopted to deal with subjective uncertainties in the quantification process of the index system. Then an evaluating method based on uncertain data envelopment analysis is proposed to provide decision-makers with a succinct result for a given operational context. Finally, the evaluating method is illustrated with a numerical example, which shows that final metric choices vary with different requirements.

An Approach to Identifying Bird Songs: A Key to more than 300 Songs in the Pipeline Road Area, Soberanía National Park, Panama

Background: Identifying bird songs is an integral part of censusing, watching, and enjoying birds. However, doing so can be difficult due to the large variety of songs and, often, subtle differences among them. One way to facilitate this is to place songs into a descriptive key, thereby analyzing each song as well as identifying similarities and differences among songs. Objective: Here I present a key to bird songs in a bird-rich location in and adjacent to the Pipeline Road area, Soberanía National Park, Panama, to help researchers and birders in Panama identify and learn these songs, and, more importantly, to provide a model for a key to aid in the analysis and characterization of bird songs in other areas. Methods: After an unfruitful attempt to find a key I could use as a template, I developed an order of choices that groups similar songs, eliminates duplication, and optimizes the probability of correctly identifying them. The order is: trill or churr, slur (for songs that do not trill or churr), tempo, pitch, and other pertinent attributes. I followed a published system of descriptive units of bird songs (i.e., element, phrase, section) and gleaned from many sources how to describe various aspects of bird songs (e.g., pitch, quality, tempo). Definitions of terms and final choices are linked to recordings of songs available in www.xeno-canto.org. Results: This key includes 321 songs of 216 species in the intact rainforest along southern Pipeline Road and the fragmented forests and wetlands adjacent to the southern entrance to Pipeline Road. These songs include all but the most rarely heard songs of the area. Conclusion: This key is the first example of a descriptive key to bird songs in Central or South America, and is unique in at least the western hemisphere in its large scope, ordering of choices, and use of links to xeno-canto. It also provides a model for the construction of keys for bird songs in other areas. In addition, this work describes and utilizes many aspects of bird songs that, if employed, can improve your abilities to listen to, remember, and differentiate among songs.

Homeward bound: fish larvae use dispersal corridors when settling on coral reefs

Homeward bound: fish larvae use dispersal corridors when settling on coral reefs

An expedient synthesis of non-racemic N-alkylated pyrrolidin-2,5-diones and piperidin-2,6-diones as peptidomimetics

In our hands, access to 2 novel peptidomimetic scaffolds, based on N-alkylated pyrroldin-2,5-diones and piperidin-2,6-diones, proved to be much more challenging than anticipated. In this short communication, we disclose the strategies that we explored and our final route choices to the desired scaffolds with control of both stereocenters.

Money Market Funds and Regulation

This article examines money market funds and the regulation that was promulgated in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Various explanations for the ensuing run-like behavior are discussed, including a first-mover advantage related to potential fire sales, the ability to redeem shares at a stable $1.00 when funds are valued below $1.00, and flights to quality and transparency. We then discuss regulatory reform, beginning with the SEC's 2010 amendments and concluding with its 2014 Money Market Fund Reform rules, which require (a) all funds to implement liquidity fees and redemption gates and (b) institutional prime funds to price at their floating net asset value. The economic underpinnings of the SEC's final policy choices are discussed and compared to alternatives, such as capital buffers, that were considered but not adopted.