Degree Of Rationality Research Articles

The effects of dynamic prompt and background transparency of hover feedback design on the user interface of shopping websites

PurposeThe implementation of interaction design concepts to facilitate communication between users and shopping websites has gained increasing attention in recent years. Mouse hover is a vital interaction method for users to access shopping sites and significantly impacts their decision-making experience. A well-designed mouse hover function can effectively enhance the user's search performance and improve the user experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the dynamic prompt designs at the hover position and the degree of feedback transparency may affect the user's task performance and personal feelings when operating the hover function on the shopping website.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed two independent variables in the experiments: dynamic prompt and background transparency of hover feedback. A between-subject design of 2 (single flicker and continuous flicker) × 3 (transparency at 0%, 25%, and 50%) was adopted in the experiment. A total of 60 participants were invited to participate in the experiment using the purposive sampling method. Participants were asked to complete four operation tasks, and the time of each was recorded. They were then asked to complete the system usability scale (SUS) questionnaire and conduct subjective evaluations before they were briefly interviewed.FindingsThe generated results revealed that: (1) In the interaction with a shopping website, the degree of background transparency of hover feedback affected the participants' task performance. (2) The effect of a single flicker had significantly higher subjective evaluation results regarding the degree of rationality compared with a continuous flicker. (3) The participants' perceptions of the information clarity were affected when the background transparency of hover feedback was 50%. (4) The effect of a continuous flicker was better than that of a single flicker when the background transparency of hover feedback was 25%. The participants' attraction to a continuous flicker was significantly higher than that of a single flicker. Nonetheless, when the degree of background transparency was at 0% or 50%, the results were the opposite.Originality/valueThe findings generated from the research can be a reference for the development of hover operation in the user interface design for shopping websites.

An interactive decision-making model of international postgraduate student course choice

ABSTRACT This paper explores the decision-making process of international non-EU postgraduates when choosing a qualification from a UK business school and proposes a new model which reflects the iterative, cyclical and continuous nature of the process. The degree of rigour and rationality employed in decision-making was often limited and influenced by culture and the composition of the decision-making unit (DMU). A Decision Maker Typology is proposed which will support segmentation strategies. Postgraduates continuously searched for information and relied on word of mouth information from students, parents, agents and academic staff. Online sources (websites, search engines and reviews) were perceived uncritically to be trustworthy sources. Data on reputation, rankings and friendship groups helped form choice sets. Forty-two qualitative interviews were conducted with international postgraduates from one Post-92 University. The need to meet the information requirements of all DMU members and stimulate information exchange to create a virtuous circle of communication was identified.

Pricing strategy and collection rate for a supply chain considering environmental responsibility behaviors and rationality degree

Owing to the coexistence of environmental pollution and green behaviors, optimizing pricing strategy and collection rate is a growing concern. We develop game-theoretical models to investigate these issues in a supply chain considering environmental responsibility behaviors under two scenarios, perfect rationality and bounded rationality. Equal-pricing and differentiated-pricing strategies are given special attention. Under perfect rationality, we find that: (i) for a high unit environmental cost of uncollected used products, to optimize collection rate, the manufacturer makes a trade-off between total environmental cost reduction and the investment in collecting used products, rather than consumers’ demand; (ii) the retailer’s profitability for remanufactured products depends on green consumers partly or fully accepting remanufactured products, especially under equal-pricing; and (iii) when green consumers partly accept remanufactured products, for a medium green consumers’ acceptance degree and a low ordinary consumers’ acceptance degree, differentiated-pricing benefits the manufacturer but hurts the retailer. When there are enough green consumers, the retailer’s interests are aligned with the manufacturer and the supply chain under differentiated-pricing. Under bounded rationality, we find that: (i) compared with perfect rationality, the manufacturer and the retailer decrease the prices for new products and collection rate, and increase the price for remanufactured products, especially under differentiated-pricing; (ii) for a low bounded rationality level, the manufacturer and supply chain are better off by using differentiated-pricing; and (iii) consumers’ multi-dimensional heterogeneities and purchasing uncertainty play important roles in choosing an optimal pricing strategy.

Obvious Strategyproofness, Bounded Rationality and Approximation

Obvious strategyproofness (OSP) has recently emerged as the solution concept of interest to study incentive compatibility in presence of agents with a specific form of bounded rationality, i.e., those who have no contingent reasoning skill whatsoever. We here want to study the relationship between the approximation guarantee of incentive-compatible mechanisms and the degree of rationality of the agents, intuitively measured in terms of the number of contingencies that they can handle in their reasoning. We weaken the definition of OSP to accommodate for cleverer agents and study the trade-off between approximation and agents’ rationality for two paradigmatic problems: machine scheduling and facility location. We prove that, for both problems, “good” approximations are possible if and only if the agents’ rationality allows for a significant number of contingencies to be considered, thus showing that OSP is not too restrictive a notion of bounded rationality from the point of view of approximation.

Analysis of the assortment and assortment policy for pastille and marmalade products

The purpose of this article is to survey the trade assortment for pastille and marmalade products sold in retail trade enterprises in Moscow, as well as to analyze the indicators of the assortment and assortment policy of trade organizations. The article presents the results of a survey of the assortment of the subcategory “Pastille and marmalade products”, conducted in three chain stores in Moscow. It has been established that the expanded assortment of these products is characterized by great depth, moderate stability and low novelty. The degree of rationality of the assortment in different stores is not the same.

Rational Degree of Belief Ceases to Be Additive When the Dutch Book Argument Is Transported to a New Environment

The strength of a person’s beliefs can be measured by the buying and selling prices they offer on contingent promissory notes. Consider a promissory note contingent on a proposition; it pays off one unit of money if the proposition is true and nothing otherwise. The more strongly a person believes the proposition, the higher the minimum price would be at which they would sell it. The same would apply to the maximum purchase price. The well-known Dutch Book Argument claims that, if the person’s beliefs are rational, their buying/selling prices should combine additively, meaning that the price of a promissory note contingent on the disjunction of two incompatible propositions should be the sum of the prices of the promissory notes contingent on the individual incompatible propositions. This paper shows that the essence of the Dutch Book Argument is that rational belief is additive because money is additive. It is proved that, if the structure of the Dutch Book Argument is kept, but a nonadditive resource is substituted for money, then rational belief will follow a nonadditive combining rule. It is also shown how rational buying/selling prices behave when the pay-off amount of a contingent note changes.

Cascading failure in coupled networks of transportation and power grid

The large-scale application of electric vehicles (EVs) makes the power grid and transportation network deeply coupled, resulting in the propagation of random disturbances and failures between the two systems. This paper proposes an analysis method of cascading failure in the coupled networks of transportation networks and power grids. The cascading failure model of a power grid with large-scale EV charging loads is established by using a direct current power flow based on the frequency response (DFR). The behavior characteristics of EVs and transportation states under failure conditions are analyzed by combining the travel decisions of users with the traffic network equilibrium. Considering the coupling relationship between the power grid and transportation networks at charging station nodes, the load–capacity model is adopted to describe the propagation of failures between the two networks. Finally, the propagation characteristics of failures considering the primary frequency modulation and rationality degree of EVs are simulated and analyzed. The simulation results show that the application of EVs makes the power grid and transportation mutually dependent, and the primary frequency modulation characteristic and bounded rationality of EVs can weaken the effect of cascading failure in the coupled networks.

Quality-speed trade-offs in customer-intensive services with boundedly rational customers and retrials

We consider a system in which one server provides customer-intensive services and the service reward increases in the length of service time. However, longer service times also lead to longer waits for customers and more congestion for the system. Considering the trade-off between the service speed and service quality, in this paper, we investigate the optimal service speed and service fee from the perspectives of revenue maximization and social welfare maximization. The customers are boundedly rational and decide whether to join the system or not according to a logit model. We find that under the revenue maximization, a decrease in the degree of rationality can alleviate congestion, but harms the social welfare. If the social planner determines the service speed and price directly, we show that bounded rationality is detrimental to service managers but beneficial to customers, while social welfare remains constant. Defining the ratio between the social welfare under the revenue-optimal strategy and socially optimal strategy as the price of anarchy (PoA), which quantifies the inefficiency of the strategy of the service provider, we obtain its upper bound and lower bound and demonstrate that the PoA is decreasing when customers become more boundedly rational and the sign of customer’s actual utility is determined by both the level of customer rationality and retrial rate. Moreover, when customers are heterogeneous in terms of perceiving service, we classify customers into two classes and the revenue maximization problem is investigated through the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm.

Research of Ferronickel Manufacturing Process by Selective Reduction of Poor Iron-Chromium-Nickel Ores

In metallurgy production nickel is an important alloying element used in the production of stainless, heat-resistant, acid-resistant grades of steel. For the development of ferronickel production in the Russian Federation, it is proposed to involve in processing complex poor iron-chromium-nickel ores of the Khalilovskoye deposit, which are not used at the present time. In the frame of this work the dependences of the elements reduction degrees of iron-chromium-nickel ore on the iron extraction degree were studied. These dependencies are necessary for the choice of the composition and development of ferronickel production technology. Burned ore raw materials were subjected to a selective carbothermal reduction in the laboratory electric arc furnace. In the obtained ferroalloy the nickel content decreased from 65 to 3%, phosphorus - from 0.68 to 0.38%, sulfur - from 0.19 to 0.10% with an increase in the reducing agent consumption. With the reduction of 1% iron, the recovery of nickel was only 50%, with 5% - 65–75%, with 20% - 95%. The content of iron oxides in the partially reduced melt with an increase in coke consumption decreased from 61 to 53%, and nickel oxide - from 0.192 to 0.010%. The analysis of the dependences allows us to make a conclusion that it is inappropriate to recover less than 5% of iron due to the low degree of nickel recovery (less than 70%). The rational degree of iron reduction from ore raw materials is 5-10%, which corresponds to the nickel content in the ferroalloy 10-20%, phosphorus - 0.3-0.5%, sulfur - 0.08-0.09%. Obviously, the resulting crude ferronickel needs refining, first of all dephosphorization.

Stable matching under forward‐induction reasoning

A standing question in the theory of matching markets is how to define stability under incomplete information. This paper proposes an epistemic approach. Agents negotiate through offers, and offers are interpreted according to the highest possible degree of rationality that can be ascribed to their proponents. A matching is deemed “stable” if maintaining the current allocation is a rationalizable action for each agent. The main result shows an equivalence between this notion and “incomplete‐information stability,” a cooperative solution concept put forward by Liu, Mailath, Postlewaite, and Samuelson (2014) for markets with incomplete information.

We Are Not Born Submissive: How the Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives by Manon Garcia

Reviewed by: We Are Not Born Submissive: How the Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives by Manon Garcia Mariah Devereux Herbeck (bio) Garcia, Manon. We Are Not Born Submissive: How the Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives. Princeton UP, 2021. Pp [i]-xiv; 234. ISBN 978-0-691-20182-5. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-691-22320-9. $22.95 (paper). Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 The Second Sex finds renewed significance for the twenty-first century in Manon Garcia's We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives. Garcia's research is not based solely on the indisputable bible of second-wave feminism, nor does it claim to analyze every aspect of the feminist manifesto, however, she describes succinctly how de Beauvoir's philosophy is key to understanding women's submission (and eventual path toward liberation) in Western society: "this book is not primarily a book on de Beauvoir's philosophy but it argues that the best way to understand women's submission is to think with Beauvoir" (author's emphasis, 21). Garcia inspires the reader to return to the seminal text, as well as to the work of other influential thinkers from Catharine MacKinnon and Gayatri Spivak to Hegel and Martin Heidegger for answers to the following question: why do some women submit to and perpetuate the patriarchy? In response to this question, as well as to other related inquiries, the book relies heavily on The Second Sex as it peels back the layers of social, political, religious and historical factors that create and (re)affirm the gender hierarchy that determines submission as the only viable option for (many) women. In the work's preface and conclusion, Garcia book-ends her research with reflection on the relationship of her manuscript to the contemporary #MeToo movement and society's response to the women involved—seen as victims by some and by others as manipulators who are willing to submit to men in order to advance their careers. In chapter one, she guides the reader in a detailed examination of the definitions of "domination" and "submission," underlining, in particular, that "to submit" is paradoxically an active verb: "it is an activity in passivity: what the subject decides, whatever the degree of rationality or complexity of this decision is to not be the one who decides" (17). Unless one is threatened with violence or physically restrained, submission is the result of a conscious decision, and an appalling one at that since it requires that one renounce one's freedom, as Garcia demonstrates via Rousseau's The Social Contract: "to deprive [man's] will of all freedom is to deprive his actions of all morality" (2). However, for women, "submission is prescribed as the normal, moral, and natural behavior" (3). Subsequently, Garcia poses a series of related questions: Is submission feminine? Is femininity a submission? Are women masochistic? And [End Page 186] finally, importantly, she questions whether or not submission is the "experience of all women" (106). As Garcia deftly explains, to answer these questions, one must invert the examination of the hierarchy; instead of viewing it from the top down (Rousseau's and other male philosophers' point of view), we must view submission from the perspective of those who live it, in this case, women. Simone de Beauvoir's work provides an ideal launchpad for such an investigation given her "meticulous research on a multiplicity of diaries, memoirs of famous women, and studies in psychology and sociology" (97). Throughout her work, Garcia repeatedly appreciates de Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right (independent from her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre), such that, at times, the book feels like a defense of de Beauvoir as much as a defense of a woman's right to freedom from predestined submission. This is not a slight of the book since Garcia's detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between the philosophers' approaches to existentialism are detailed and informative. In conclusion, Garcia demonstrates to what extent—contrary to the opening analysis of the definition of submission—women do not have a choice; one's destiny is "predetermined by social norms" (194). However, she does her best to end on a hopeful note...

Rational expectations and differentiated information costs for heterogeneous fundamentalists in an evolutive Muthian cobweb model

We extend the evolutionary cobweb setting proposed in Hommes and Wagener [J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 75, 25–39 (2010)] in which the share updating mechanism is based on a comparison among the profits realized by the different kinds of agents, by assuming that the market is populated by rational producers, endowed with perfect foresight expectations about prices, in addition to biased and unbiased fundamentalists. Moreover, we suppose that agents face heterogeneous information costs, which are proportional to their rationality degree. Since we found in Naimzada and Pireddu [Econ. Lett. 186, 108513 (2020a)] that considering diversified information costs for fundamentalists shrinks the stability region of the steady state, while we discovered in Naimzada and Pireddu [J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 177, 415–432 (2020b)] that introducing rational agents enlarges it, we analyze whether one of the two aspects always prevails over the other one when they are jointly taken into account. We also investigate if the chaotic phenomena detected in Naimzada and Pireddu [J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 177, 415–432 (2020b)] emerging when enriching the original framework in Hommes and Wagener [J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 75, 25–39 (2010)] with rational agents, persist or are inhibited by the introduction of information costs for all agent types. We complete our analysis by studying the network of the relationships among the four settings obtained possibly considering information costs for biased and unbiased fundamentalists and possibly introducing rational agents.

ВИКОРИСТАННЯ ОБ’ЄКТІВ КУЛЬТУРНОЇ СПАДЩИНИ УКРАЇНИ ДЛЯ ЦІЛЕЙ РОЗВИТКУ ТУРИЗМУ ТА ЕКСКУРСІЙНОЇ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ

Ukraine has a significant potential of cultural heritage objects of various nature, with varying degrees of involvement and rationality of use in tourism and excursion activities, which requires research and generalization of the accumulated experience. In Ukraine, the term cultural heritage refers to the entire set of cultural heritage objects inherited by humanity from previous generations. Currently, these registers include 1,155 objects of national significance and 13,931 objects of local significance. In terms of the number of monuments of national importance, the AR of Crimea, the city of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Zakarpattia, and Cherkasy regions are among the top five. On the other hand, Dnipropetrovsk Sumy, Kharkiv Poltava, and Odesa regions are leading in terms of the number of monuments of local importance. 47 elements have been added to the National List of Elements of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ukraine. All objects can have different statuses: local, state/national and international. The latest status of the objects is confirmed and provided by UNESCO and described in the Convention on the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, to which Ukraine has joined. Since then, only 6 objects of cultural, 1 natural and 4 intangible heritage have this status in the state. A comparison was made of the number of objects included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in Ukraine with other European countries. An analysis of the level of use of these objects for the purposes of tourism development and excursion activities was carried out. The range of use of cultural heritage objects is limited in a certain way and is determined by the adopted legislation, in particular in Ukraine it is the Law "On the Protection of Cultural Heritage", which regulates the use of cultural heritage objects in public life, maintenance and use of monuments, sightseeing visiting sights, and also determines directions of possible use of sights. Among the most effective for the development of tourism and excursion activities, the authors identify museification and adaptation. Based on the analysis, the authors offer a number of universal proposals for the intensification of the attraction of cultural heritage objects for the purposes of tourism development and excursion activities.

Moral Idiots and Blameless Brutes in Aristotle’s Ethics

Aristotle maintains that vicious people are blameworthy despite their moral ignorance, since becoming vicious was up to them (eph’ hemin) and whatever is up to us we are able to do or not do. However, one’s upbringing shapes one’s moral character. Together, these claims invite an objection I call the horrible childhood challenge. According to this objection, vicious adults who suffered horrible childhoods through which they were taught to adopt bad ends as though they were good should not be held accountable for their vice. Aristotle’s likely answer to this challenge reveals that, for Aristotle, a minimal degree of rationality is necessary for moral responsibility. I argue that, for Aristotle, a vicious agent is responsible for her vice only if 1) she is rational, which implies 2) she grasps a specific basic principle, thus consenting to become a certain kind of person through action. The thoroughly bad who satisfy both claims are moral idiots; those who do not may be blameless brutes.

Determination of hydrogen consumption for solid-phase selective reduction of complex iron ore raw materials in laboratory research

The urgency of the applying of hydrogen as a reducing agent, as well as the involvement of off-balance complex and technogenic raw materials in metallurgical production is confirmed by the depleting reserves of coking coals and rich iron ores, the presence of large reserves of nickel in complex ores and dump slags, an increasing amount of metallurgical waste that pollutes the environment, the need for mechanical engineering for steels with a low carbon content and inexpensive ferroalloys, the presence of an unlimited amount of hydrogen in nature, the possibility of almost complete use of hydrogen with the exclusion of environmental pollution in metallurgical production, the possibility of selective extraction of components of complex ores, the feasibility of import substitution with an improvement in product quality. In this work the main parameters of the solid-phase reduction of nickel-containing ore from the Sakharinskoye deposit were determined, by mathematical modeling: hydrogen consumption, the amount and composition of reduction products at various degrees of iron extraction from ore raw materials. The results of mathematical modeling show that it is impractical to recover less than 5 % of iron by reason of the low degree of nickel recovery (less than 70 %). The rational degree of iron reduction from complex ore raw materials ranges from 5 to 10 %, which ensures the nickel content in the resulting ferroalloy up to 10 %. Such a ferroalloy can be used for the production of low-alloy steel grades 10HSND, 15 HSND, 17 HSND, which are widely used in shipbuilding. The resulting ferrous slag can then be used for iron manufacturing, which makes it possible to implement waste-free technology.

Research on the Contradiction of Communicative Rationality in the Network Public Sphere

The network public sphere is an absence space under the background of the network society. Compared with the presence space, the absence space is a space where facial expressions, specific places, and specific environments are not presented. It is a virtual space with the connotation of information flow, symbol display, language exchange and meaning pursuit. The communicative action in the absence space is constructed with symbols as the core, and has new content compared to the previous presence space. Correspondingly, the communicative action in the network public sphere has also formed new characteristics: the cross-temporal and spatial nature of communicative symbols in the communication process, the perceptibility of attitude trends, the diversity of cultural backgrounds, and the low cost of interaction. This article focuses on the impact of the low cost of interaction on the communication action in the network public sphere. On the one hand, the low cost of interaction is an important factor that directly leads to the low degree of rationalization of communicative actions. On the other hand, this feature is also an important force to promote the rise of the network public sphere, because the low cost of interaction makes the discussion in the public sphere more adequate. As far as the current social situation is concerned, the rationality of communication in the network public sphere has not been fully established. Finally, combined with Habermas' theory of communicative action, this article believes that the core of establishing communicative rationality in the Internet age lies in the modernization of human.

Rationing of Nursing Care on Example of Selected Health Care Facility.

Contemporary health determinants require nurses to develop new competencies and skills while performing complex tasks in all forms of health care. The problem of rationing of care is present all over the world and usually occurs when available resources are too low to provide adequate care to all patients. The most common reasons for loss of care are shortages of nurses, use of modern treatment methods, increased demand for care by a large number of patients, and greater knowledge of patients about their rights. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 295 nurses employed in hospital wards. The survey was conducted from September to December 2020 using the standardized BERNCA (The Basel Extent of Rationing of Nursing Care) questionnaire to measure the level of rationing of nursing care. The research was hampered by the sanitation regime associated with the SARS CoV-2 pandemic. Nursing care rationing is dependent on seniority and place of work. The mean total BERNCA score of the degree of rationing of nursing care was 2.58 ± 0.96 on a scale of 0 to 4 (where 0 means “no need for it” and 4 means “often”. The median score was 2.69. The higher frequency of rationing nursing care was characteristic of those working on surgical wards. The mean score obtained by them was 2.72 ± 0.86, with the median equal to 2.88. In the case of nurses employed in non-surgical wards, the scores were 2.08 ± 1.07 and 2.28, respectively. Rationing of nursing care is dependent on seniority and work location, with a higher degree of rationing of care occurring in surgical units.

Multi-Objective Optimization of Differentiated Urban Ring Road Bus Lines and Fares Based on Travelers’ Interactive Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a new multi-objective bi-level programming model for the ring road bus lines and fare design problems. The proposed model consists of two layers: the traffic management operator and travelers. In the upper level, we propose a multi-objective bus lines and fares optimization model in which the operator’s profit and travelers’ utility are set as objective functions. In the lower level, evolutionary multi agent model of travelers’ bounded rational reinforcement learning with social interaction is introduced. A solution algorithm for the multi-objective bi-level programming is developed on the basis of the equalization algorithm of OD matrix. A numerical example based on a real case was conducted to verify the proposed models and solution algorithm. The computational results indicated that travel choice models with different degrees of rationality significantly changed the optimization results of bus lines and the differentiated fares; furthermore, the multi-objective bi-level programming in this paper can generate the solution to reduce the maximum section flow, increase the profit, and reduce travelers’ generalized travel cost.

How rational is gambling?

AbstractThe typical gambler loses money but continues to gamble nonetheless. Why? Research from orthodox and behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, and medicine has offered a wide range of possible explanations. This paper reviews these explanations. The evidence is organized according to the degree of rationality assumed and/or found in the studies. This approach allows research from highly distinctive fields to be integrated within a unified framework. Gambling patterns are so highly dispersed that no satisfying one‐fits‐all explanation is possible. The findings suggest that the whole spectrum from rationality to highly destructive irrationality can be found within the gambler population.

Adaptive Reputation Promotes Trust in Social Networks

Trust has played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern human societies, and it continues to be an essential underpinning of our social interactions. It is therefore important that we develop rigorous mathematical foundations that will enable us to better understand what promotes and what erodes trust and how to best preserve trustworthiness. To that effect we here propose a trust game, wherein investors, trustworthy trustees, and untrustworthy trustees compete for assets subject to a third-party evaluation system that oversees and modifies each individual reputation. We use Monte Carlo simulations on social networks to determine critical values of the degree of rationality and the reputation threshold that warrant high levels of trust and social wealth. We show that if investors have access to the reputation scores of trustees, the fraction of untrustworthy trustees drops if only the degree of rationality is sufficiently large, and this irrespective of the reputation threshold that determines the cutoff for untrustworthiness. But even though investors are allowed irrational investments, trust can still proliferate if the reputation threshold is sufficiently high. Our results thus formalize essential mechanisms of trust in social networks, which also outline policies to diminish untrustworthiness that can be employed in real life.