BACKGROUND Effective maternal and perinatal audits are associated with improved quality of care and reduction of severe adverse outcome. Although audits at the level of care were formally introduced in Tanzania around 25 years ago, little information is available about their existence, performance, and practical barriers to their implementation. This study assessed the structure, process and im...

During the 1950s and 1960s, research teams across the country searched for differences that explained why some organizations were highly successful while others were only marginally successful, if at all. Several of them came to similar explanations involving managerial treatment and use of their subordinates. Major researchers were Rensis Likert, Douglas McGregor, Robert R. Blake (withJane S. ...

This paper describes our effort to spread “function/value approach” in a prototype of Italian Public Administration, where VA/VE are unknown, and where we are going to structure decision processes. Actually, our Decision Support System (DSS) based on “value approach” is going to guide Public Administrations in decisions about mobility problems. It is not only a cost reduction tool, but a value ...

Can a generation’s discounting of future generations’ consumption utilities be interpreted as “pure” altruism towards future generations, that is, a concern that these are better off according to their likewise forward-looking preferences? It turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature. In particular, traditional exponential dis...

Computer-supported negotiation processes are recurrent in many applications, typically to coordinate a set of autonomous decision-makers in order for them to reach a consensus on negotiated issues. In previous papers, we have presented Xplore, a generic model and tool for the design of such coordination, which subsumes a wide range of existing negotiation protocols and schemes. In this paper, w...

This paper introduces the concept of firm belief, which is proposed as a new epistemic model for a wide class of preferences. In particular, firm beliefs are shown to have the following desirable properties: (i) they are derived from preferences according to a plausible rule of epistemic inference; (ii) they satisfy standard logical properties; and (iii) tractable representations of firm belief...

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We suggest a framework to analyse how individuals combine multiple sources of information to form predictions. We assume that individuals understand each source of information separately, but they are not certain about the correlation between them. We bound the ability of individuals to grasp such correlations by a notion of “correlation capacity”. We show that given this capacity there is a se...

Cheap talk models provide a strategic analysis of information transmission between the expert and the decision maker when their preferences are not perfectly aligned. Although the majority of these models analyze the case of a single decision maker, in many important settings the decision-making authority is shared between several agents. Here we consider a commonly used procedure: ultimatum ba...

We investigate the semantic foundations of a method for modeling agents as entities with a mental state which was suggested by McCarthy and by Newell. Our goals are to formalize this modeling approach and its semantics, to understand the theoretical and practical issues that it raises, and to address some of them. In particular, this requires specifying the model’s parameters and how these para...