Unacceptable Alternatives Research Articles

A family of distances for preference–approvals

A preference–approval on a set of alternatives consists of a weak order on that set and, additionally, a cut-off line that separates acceptable and unacceptable alternatives. In this paper, we propose a new method for defining the distance between preference–approvals taking into account jointly the disagreements in preferences and approvals for each pair of alternatives. The proposed distance is compared to the existing distance functions to deal with clustering problems. Specifically, we prove that our metric improves the estimated clusters in terms of both stability and accuracy.

Constitution of "The Already Dying": The Emergence of Voluntary Assisted Dying in Victoria.

In June 2019 Victoria became the first state in Australia to permit "voluntary assisted dying" (VAD), with its governance detailed in the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) ("VAD Act"). While taking lead from the regulation of medically assisted death practices in other parts of the world, Victoria's legislation nevertheless remains distinct. The law in Victoria only makes VAD available to persons determined to be "already dying": it is expressly limited to those medically prognosed to die "within weeks or months." In this article, we discuss the emergence of the Victorian legislation across key formative documents. We show how, in devising VAD exclusively for those "already at the end of their lives", the Victorian state mobilizes the medico-legal category of the already dying. We argue that this category functions to negotiate a path between what are seen as the unacceptable alternatives of violent suicide on the one hand, and an unlimited right to die on the other. Further, we argue that the category of the already dying operates to make medical practitioners the gatekeepers of this new life-ending choice and effectively limits the realization of autonomy at the end of life.

Sustainable Development of the Energy Sector in a Country Deficient in Mineral Resources: The Case of the Republic of Moldova

The energy sector is an essential element in an economy’s infrastructure, so a deficit of national mineral resources makes the energy sector dependent on imports of raw materials, which in turn can negatively affect a country’s energy security. The sustainable development of the energy sector for countries with transitioning economies should be based on the energy trilemma. Four principles are proposed: diversification of energy resources and energy generation sources, ensuring energy efficiency, ensuring energy affordability, and green energy production. Based on a comparative analysis of the economic and energy indicators (for the years 2014 to 2019) of European countries that are not members of the European Union, the situation in the energy sector of the Republic of Moldova is classified as critical and its fundamental issues are identified (107th place in the World Energy Trilemma Index). The main objectives of the study are: (1) To analyze energy and economic efficiency as well as the conditions for and problems of the functioning of the energy sector in countries with transition economies (using non-European Union countries as an example); (2) To present a substantiation of the directions for development of the energy sector in countries with transition economies that lack energy resources (using the Republic of Moldova as an example), taking into account the identified factors and principles of sustainable development; (3) To develop an economic and mathematical model for assessing the directions for the development of the energy sector in countries with transition economies using multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Decision-making methods can be used to select strategic development alternatives, particularly in the energy sector. MCDA has several advantages and uses in the following situations: comparing several alternatives; identifying the most preferable and unacceptable alternatives; comparing alternatives based on several (sometimes conflicting) criteria; looking for a compromise in a situation where different stakeholders have conflicting goals or values. A methodology including a system of 7 indicators and an economic and mathematical model for assessing development paths for the energy sector in countries with transition economies were developed that are based on multiple-criteria decision analysis. An algorithm and a computer program were developed to carry out MCDA and select the best development path for the energy sector of the Republic of Moldova. The article presents a rationale for choosing the best option regarding the development of the energy sector of the Republic of Moldova, which is a country with a deficit of its own energy resources.

Poliheuristic Theory and Germany’s (Non-)Participation in Multinational Military Interventions. The Non-compensatory Principle, Coalition Politics and Political Survival

This article employs the poliheuristic theory of decision-making (PHT) to analyse German decisions to participate in, or abstain from, multinational military operations. PHT represents one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in foreign policy analysis. The theory posits a two-stage model of foreign policy-making: in the first stage, actors rely on a non-compensatory strategy as a cognitive shortcut to eliminate unacceptable alternatives and to reduce the choice set. In the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of information-processing and select the alternative which maximises expected utility. While there is broad agreement that the non-compensatory dimension at the first stage of PHT concerns the domestic repercussions of foreign policy, it is less clear how this ‘domestic politics’ dimension should be operationalised. This article contributes to this debate by specifying the operationalisation of the non-compenstaory principle in the context of coalition foreign policy making in parliamentary democracies. Specifically, it suggests that the non-compensatory dimension in coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. Empirically, the article argues that PHT sheds important new light on arguably some of the most controversial military deployment decisions (Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Libya) of post-unification Germany.

Passive Empowerment

In a world where paid work is touted as a development panacea, empowering women has started to look a lot like burdening them. I argue here that this burdening of women is a predictable result of the conception of empowerment as choice or agency. Dominant conceptions of empowerment characterize empowerment as the increase in a person’s ability to do what they choose. Yet conditions of gender equality and poverty structure women’s options such that choosing (among unacceptable alternatives), doing (too much), and doing more (than men) are often both women’s best option and modes of disempowerment. Seeing the way increased agency can be disempowering requires shifting away from the view that social structures disempower by constraining individual agency. We instead need a conception of power as a constraint on individual action to a conception of power as structuring the field of available actions in ways that affect the relative position of social groups. Through a discussion of the gender division of labor and the feminization of responsibility, I argue that a more feminist conception of empowerment will weaken the link between empowerment and individual agency.

Sweatshop Regulation and Workers’ Choices

The choice argument against sweatshop regulations states that public officials should not prohibit workers from accepting jobs that require long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions, because enforcing such regulations would be disrespectful to the workers who choose to work in sweatshops. Critics of the choice argument reply that these regulations can be justified when workers only choose to work in sweatshops because they lack acceptable alternatives and are unable to coordinate to achieve better conditions for all workers. My thesis is that the presence of unacceptable alternatives to sweatshop labor or barriers to coordination cannot justify sweatshop regulations such as minimum wage and maximum hour laws. Although officials should promote alternatives to difficult and dangerous sweatshop labor, they should not do so by limiting workers’ and employers’ options through coercive regulation. And the fact that sweatshop workers may face coordination problems does not undermine the claim that sweatshop workers choose to work in sweatshops, just as other workers face coordination problems but nevertheless make occupational choices. Furthermore, efforts to restrict sweatshop workers’ choices are morally risky and may not promote workers’ wellbeing or wellbeing in general.

An index-based robust decision making framework for watershed management in a changing climate

This study developed an index-based robust decision making framework for watershed management dealing with water quantity and quality issues in a changing climate. It consists of two parts of management alternative development and analysis. The first part for alternative development consists of six steps: 1) to understand the watershed components and process using HSPF model, 2) to identify the spatial vulnerability ranking using two indices: potential streamflow depletion (PSD) and potential water quality deterioration (PWQD), 3) to quantify the residents’ preferences on water management demands and calculate the watershed evaluation index which is the weighted combinations of PSD and PWQD, 4) to set the quantitative targets for water quantity and quality, 5) to develop a list of feasible alternatives and 6) to eliminate the unacceptable alternatives. The second part for alternative analysis has three steps: 7) to analyze all selected alternatives with a hydrologic simulation model considering various climate change scenarios, 8) to quantify the alternative evaluation index including social and hydrologic criteria with utilizing multi-criteria decision analysis methods and 9) to prioritize all options based on a minimax regret strategy for robust decision. This framework considers the uncertainty inherent in climate models and climate change scenarios with utilizing the minimax regret strategy, a decision making strategy under deep uncertainty and thus this procedure derives the robust prioritization based on the multiple utilities of alternatives from various scenarios. In this study, the proposed procedure was applied to the Korean urban watershed, which has suffered from streamflow depletion and water quality deterioration. Our application shows that the framework provides a useful watershed management tool for incorporating quantitative and qualitative information into the evaluation of various policies with regard to water resource planning and management.

Consumers' motivational associations favoring free-range meat or less meat

The present paper analyzed the motivational orientations of consumers who choose to eat (1) small portions of meat or (2) ethically distinctive meat, such as free-range meat, in relation to the motivational orientations of their opposites. Going beyond the conventional approach to consumer behavior, our work builds on recent insights in motivational psychology about the ways in which people may approach matches or avoid mismatches to the desired end-state of “getting enough nourishment by eating the right food”. Consumers who tend to approach matches are often focused on choosing the best alternatives from their choice set (chronic promotion focus). Consumers who tend to avoid mismatches are often focused on rejecting unacceptable alternatives from their choice set (chronic prevention focus). Distinguishing these two motivational orientations provides a scientific basis for the aim to foster more sustainable food consumption and production patterns. Our approach involves a systematic analysis of consumers' goal orientations regarding meat choices. We examined how a sample of Dutch consumers ( n = 939) described their chronic motivational orientations regarding food, their own meat choices and, about two weeks later, their promotion- and prevention-oriented associations favoring either small portions of meat and free-range meat or their opposites. Largely in line with our hypotheses we found that consumers with a chronic prevention orientation avoided the mismatch of “large portions”. Also, those of them who paid the premium price of free-range meat considered eating “meat produced by intensive farming“ a mismatch. Conversely, if consumers with a chronic promotion orientation paid the premium price of free-range meat, they considered this the best alternative from their choice set. Accordingly, choosing a small portion of meat was often approached with a prevention orientation and choosing free-range meat with either a prevention or a promotion orientation. These differences in motivational orientation underline that the pursuit of sustainability requires careful consideration of not just undesirable but also of desirable alternatives.

Towards solving the crisis of Islam in higher education

This paper identifies the crisis in Muslim higher education as stemming from two unacceptable alternatives: (i) ethnically based Islamic education out of step with British culture and (ii) an ‘objective’ Islamic studies approach which is not held in esteem by the Muslim community. The path forward for Islamic education in Britain lies in highlighting the role of the study of Islam in higher education in both universities and private Muslim institutions as a necessary source of teachers and Imams for the Muslim community in the United Kingdom. This article examines the need for the Muslim community of Britain to have British educated and trained Imams to educate their youth in their mosques with regard to a Muslim ‘way of life’. The aim of this study is to explore the status of Muslim Imams in the UK with regard to their role as teachers and role models.

Social Indicators and the Study of Inequality

As we near the close of the twentieth century, communist regimes have collapsed and the productivity of capitalism is universally acclaimed. In all the Western democracies, welfare state institutions are being challenged. The challenge is, arguably, the most fundamental in the United States. Proposals to privatize public education and oldage insurance are now mainstream. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act represents the most recent, and is likely to be the most influential, change in public policy for the poor. By eliminating the historical entitlement to welfare, and devolving responsibility for welfare programs to the states, the Personal Responsibility Act dramatically changes the nature, level, and locus of government responsibility for the poor. Other policy changes-such as the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program and Child Care and Development Block Grant-have expanded resources and state-level discretion for the provision of support. Supporters of the retrenchment and devolution of federal programs predict that these changes will improve the fortunes of the most disadvantaged Americans and help close the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Critics predict that these same changes will harm the poor and increase inequality. The disagreement stems, in part, from different expectations about the intermediate impact of devolution on government, community, and family systems. Some observers argue that government has displaced support from the family, community, and voluntary sectors; they expect government retrenchment to enhance the capacity and contribution from these nongovernmental systems. Others argue that government has a unique capacity to support disadvantaged populations and to promote greater equality in economic and social outcomes; they fear that government retrenchment will create a level of need that will overwhelm private systems and force individuals to turn to unreliable and unacceptable alternatives. Efforts to confirm or disprove predictions such as these are creating new opportunities, along with new challenges, for scholars who are interested in questions about economic security and equality. New opportunities are arising with the natural experiments that are created as state and local governments revise, redesign, and reduce a variety of income assistance and social service programs. New challenges are arising as analysts attempt to track the rapidly changing policy landscape and collect data with which to evaluate the impact of the changes. The New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS) project represents one effort to track the consequences of policy and devolution for inequality and well-being in the largest and most diverse city in the United States. The project uses a telephone survey to collect data from a repeated cross-sectional sample of the entire city population. The survey will collect detailed information on families' economic resources, assets, external support, and health and well-being. By analyzing these data by population and over time, we hope to address questions that are at the core of current debates about inequality in the United States: How great is inequality? Does income inequality exaggerate, or reflect, inequality in material and social living conditions, health, and well-being? Is inequality on these dimensions growing or shrinking? And what effect have devolution and social policy reform had on the magnitude of income and other forms of inequality? In the following sections, we present first-year findings from the project. We begin with an overview of the issues that motivated the project and a brief summary of our measures and data-collection methods. The next sections use data collected in 1997 to tell the story of income and outcome inequality in the city-first, in terms of comparisons between the well-being of New Yorkers and the rest of the U.S. population; second, in terms of the well-being of poor and economically secure residents of the city. …

Using AHP and L.P. for choosing the best alternatives based the gap analysis

Analytic Hierarchy Process is a well-known method that is only able to rank different alternatives according to their AHP weights, but it does not determine the necessary threshold for discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable alternatives. In the other words, it does not lead the DM to choose the alternatives that have higher weights than the threshold. In this paper, we introduce a new method by which we are able to accept/reject alternatives based on AHP weights. The proposed method determines the necessary threshold by comparing the anticipated status with the desired status of alternatives and using LP and AHP combination for it.

Traditional Decision Analysis and the Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy Decision Making

The poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making posits a two-stage process wherein the decision maker first employs a noncompensatory decision rule to eliminate politically unacceptable alternatives and then employs a (perhaps) traditional decision procedure to select from the remaining set of acceptable alternatives. Ageneral decision analysis is used to provide a structured account of the elimination process of the first stage of the poliheuristic theory by displaying a noncompensatory decision rule for eliminating unacceptable policy alternatives. The results show how general decision analysis can be used to specify when an alternative is unacceptable to a political decision maker who is sensitive to public opinion.

Contrast Effects and Approval Voting: An Illustration of a Systematic Violation of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Condition

In approval voting, voters indicate all alternatives acceptable to them, instead of indicating their most preferred alternative. This study sought to examine the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, approval voting systematically violates a rationality condition of social choice: the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition. Given a well‐known psychological phenomenon, the contrast effect, it was hypothesized that sets of acceptable alternatives might be changed as a result of changes in unacceptable alternatives. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of undergraduates who were presented with fictional profiles of juvenile delinquents and then were asked whether they should be granted parole. The outcomes of approval voting changed merely as the result of a change in an alternative least preferred by all voters.

Recommendations for sustainable hydroelectric development

Hydroelectricity represents a large-scale alternative to fossil fuel generation, contributing only very small amounts to greenhouse gas emissions and other atmospheric pollutants. However, developing the remaining hydroelectric potential offers many challenges. Public pressure and expectations regarding the environmental and social performance of hydropower tend to increase over time. Moreover, in the context of the restructuring of the electricity sector, markets may favor more polluting (and less costly) options. This article, based on an International Energy Agency initiative on hydropower, proposes a set of actions to meet these challenges and develop the remaining hydropower potential in a sustainable way. It is the role of Governments to put forward policies and regulations that do not unduly favor or penalize specific power generation options, while effectively protecting the environment and the rights of affected populations. In setting up such policies and regulations, the positive externalities of hydropower—versatility of energy services, very few regional or global impacts, flood control, etc.—should be clearly recognized. The industry also has a central role to play. Environmental mitigation measures and compensation for persons and communities affected by hydropower projects are well understood today, and should be universally applied. Developers have the responsibility to fully integrate appropriate measures into project design. This also means eliminating unacceptable alternatives early in the planning process, allowing for full community participation, and sharing project benefits with local populations.

A prescriptive production-distribution approach for decision making in new product design

The production problem in product design consists of determining technically feasible options and implementing collective decision making to decide which alternatives to produce. A problem with considering collective decision making in the production problem is that it may not be possible to define, a priori, a group utility function, due to the difficulty of making interpersonal comparisons of the members' preferences. Constructing a group utility function and solving the production problem may lead to unacceptable alternatives for some of the members. The distribution problem involves consideration of individual preferences in satisfying group decision-making situations. If production and distribution of the products are considered simultaneously, the preferences of the members are taken into account, explicitly leading to acceptable solutions. This approach also allows for explicit consideration of a company business strategy in determining which products to develop. A production-distribution approach is outlined and demonstrated for the design of a power electronics module product with a group of decision makers consisting of three customers and a manufacturer. In addition to explicit consideration of the customers' preference, some business strategies are also considered, leading to product alternatives acceptable to the customers and manufacturer.

Information-theoretic estimation of individual consideration set

Generally, in the choice modeling literature, each individual decision-maker is assumed to be aware of a set of alternatives at the start of the decision process. This initial set defined as the awareness set usually includes a mixture of alternatives, some seriously and some casually under contemplation. The decision-making process leads to a partitioning of the awareness set into two disjoint subsets: consideration set and non-consideration set. The consideration set consists of the more seriously considered alternatives. This paper proposes an information-theoretic algorithm for estimating the consideration set. The proposed algorithm estimates the choice probabilities in the awareness sets according to the maximum entropy principle which by use of a multinomial logit model, computes an individual information index for each set, identifies the weak or unacceptable alternatives for each individual, and reduces each awareness set to a consideration set. The average of the selected alternative probabilities is proposed as a statistic by which the predicmtive quality of various consideration sets can be compared. We empirically illustrate the proposed method by estimating consideration sets for a sample of industrial decision-makers using a real world marketing data set. The analysis leads to an important finding; that the predictive power of the multinomial logit is in identifying the weak (non-considered) alternatives rather than predicting the chosen alternative among the choices in the consideration set. The proposed algorithm enables us to empirically implement choice set reduction for a given data set using an information criterion. Thus, the stage is set for advancing choice theory by investigating the impact of using additional data and/or other choice models on the derived consideration sets.

Sartre/Cinema: Spectator/Art That Is Not One

Cinematic spectatorship and its relation to questions of gender has been the focus of numerous articles and theoretical projects since the early 1970s.' Laura Mulvey's 1975 article, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,2 spelled out the implications of Lacanian-Althusserian models of spectatorship (Metz, Baudry) for a critique of patriarchal cinema.3 Her original argument is well-known: with predictable success, commercial filmmakers lure spectators into darkened rooms with the implicit promise of satisfying innate scopophilic desires of either a voyeuristic or a fetishistic order. White, middle-class, male and heterosexual, Mulvey's implied spectator views films produced in Hollywood's classical era of film narrative that, according to Roland Barthes, systematically reproduce the Oedipal configuration relegating women to the status of object. Mulvey's first theoretization of cinematic reception was limited by its preoccupation with a male gaze embedded in a period yet untouched by critiques of society and culture. Her Afterthoughts in 1981 were meant to rectify this limitation by circumscribing the female spectator's reaction to film.4 As in Freud's theories on femininity, Mulvey considered the female spectator as oscillating between the two equally unacceptable alternatives of regressive masculinization through identification with a male hero (transvestism) or masochistically imagining herself in a conventional female position, both of which perpetuate the patriarchal economy of images and looking. Theories of spectatorship and alternate film forms practiced now for more than a decade elude stable definition.5 Far from producing answers and inviting closure, questions of spectatorship and its relation to gender have proven more ambiguous than previously thought. While many film critics remain in general agreement with Mulvey, the reduction of all moviegoing pleasure to voyeuristic, fetishistic, or masochistic scopophilia -the inevitable masculinization or feminization of the film spectatorseems far too limiting. Feminist film critics no longer take for granted that to experience visual pleasure implies subservience to patriarchal values through direct or displaced identifications. Judith Mayne suggests as much in a rhetorical question she posed in 1981: women cast a cinematic gaze inside rooms, does this necessarily entail an identification with the entire system of cinematic voyeurism?6 If women are to continue to participate as film spectators, then it is urgent to formulate the evolution of a newly oriented spectatorship that would not feed repressive economies of perception. Mary Ann Doane has succinctly expressed the problem by asserting that feminist

Endless Unacceptable Alternatives: The Case of Sondra

The Career Development QuarterlyVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 40-43 Endless Unacceptable Alternatives: The Case of Sondra Bruce W. Hartman, Bruce W. Hartman Professor Bruce W. Hartman is a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. He is also a licensed psychologist and maintains a private practice in Maplewood.Search for more papers by this author Bruce W. Hartman, Bruce W. Hartman Professor Bruce W. Hartman is a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. He is also a licensed psychologist and maintains a private practice in Maplewood.Search for more papers by this author First published: September 1990 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-0045.1990.tb00234.xCitations: 9 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume39, Issue1September 1990Pages 40-43 RelatedInformation

The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis

Analysing the conflicts within and between organised industrial and agricultural forces in Germany as well as those between capital and labour, the author shows how these conflicts made it impossible for a coherent political force to emerge to hold the democratic republic together and how, after a period of costly cooperation with labour, and faced with unacceptable alternatives, Germany's elites found unity in a dictatorship that removed the working class from politics and obliged the dominant classes to abdicate all but their economic interests.

Supersymmetry at ordinary energies. II.Rinvariance, Goldstone bosons, and gauge-fermion masses

We explore the observable consequences of supersymmetry, under the assumption that it is broken spontaneously at energies of order 300 GeV. Theories of this sort tend automatically to obey a global $R$ symmetry, which presents us with a choice among phenomenologically unacceptable alternatives. If the $R$ symmetry is broken by scalar vacuum expectation values of order 300 GeV, there will be a semiweakly coupled light Goldstone boson, similar to an axion. If it is not broken by such vacuum expectation values but is broken by quantum-chromodynamic (QCD) anomalies, then there will be a light ninth pseudoscalar meson. If it is not broken by QCD anomalies, then the asymptotic freedom of QCD is lost at high energies, killing the hope of an eventual meeting of the electroweak and strong couplings within the regime of validity of perturbation theory. We also confront the problem of an uncomfortably light gluino. A general analysis of gaugino masses shows that the gluino mass is at most of order 1 GeV, and in many cases much less.