Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse to what extent religious beliefs, understood as part of an individual ' s cultural background, can explain an individual ' s willingness to work. In particular the paper links individuals’ willingness to increase their working time with their...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of separating out three key dimensions of culture’s value – definition, measurement and cultural reporting. This has implications for the balance between quantitative and qualitative methodologies in achieving a meaningful...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the influence that newspaper, blog and social media sources of information about a play have on respondents’ willingness to purchase a ticket to a theatrical production. Design/methodology/approach Respondents saw two advertisements and one...

This article describes how Plato proposed the dualistic solution to the mind-body problem, providing an explanation along the lines of his epistemology. Francis Bacon, in 1600, formulated his vision of the scientific method that will be valid until the 1960's when Karl Popper proposed his...

Abstract This paper explores the use of heuristic search algorithms for modeling human decision making. It is shown that this algorithm is consistent with many observed behavioral regularities, and may help explain deviations from rational choice. The main insight is that the heuristic function...

We consider a decision maker who enjoys choosing from a varied set of alternatives. Building on behavioral evidence, we propose testable axioms which characterize preference for variety and provide a representation theorem. We go on to illustrate the potential effects of preference for variety...

Abstract Health impact simulation models are used to predict how a proposed policy or scenario will affect population health outcomes. These models represent the typically-complex systems that describe how the scenarios affect exposures to risk factors for disease or injury (e.g. air pollution...

Abstract In a recent issue of this journal, Philip Dawid (2021) proposes a framework for causal inference that is based on statistical decision theory and that is, in many aspects, compatible with the familiar framework of causal graphs (e.g., Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs)). This editorial...

We examine the traditional deterrence game between Challenger and Defender. We treat two variations of the game – the complete information game and the one-sided information game where the first mover, Challenger, is the uncertain player. We employ sequential decision theory to analyze the...