For a multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problem, the so-called consensus reaching process is used to achieve an agreement among experts and finally make a common decision. Unfortunately, so far the consensus models for MAGDM haven’t been completely studied, especially for MAGDM under uncertain linguistic environment. The disadvantages of most existing consensus models could be summa...

BACKGROUND Reports suggest approximately 21-23% of GPs in the UK have consulted with patients using email, but little is known about the nature of this use and what it means for clinicians and patients in general practice. AIM To understand the use of email consultation in general practice by investigating the experiences of existing users and views of experts. DESIGN AND SETTING A qualitat...

A central challenge in securing property rights is the subversion of justice. We present a model polluter whose discharges harm multiple owners, and we compare rules, liability regulation on efficiency grounds. provide conditions under which rules are preferred to thus verifying Calabresi-Melamed conjecture. Regulation that enforces partial abatement may be either extreme rules. An empirical an...

Product models of low dimensional experts are a powerful way to avoid the curse of dimensionality. We present the "under­ complete product of experts" (UPoE), where each expert models a one dimensional pro­ jection of the data. The UPoE may be inter­ preted as a parametric probabilistic model for projection pursuit. Its ML learning rules are identical to the approximate learning rules proposed ...

regulation is a modern concept which has emerged out of and evolved in the context of economic development in general and the relationship between market and government in particular. it signifies a different meaning with the past. even nowadays we are faced with various meanings of regulation within the economic legal systems; meanings that have moved away from its early definition, and hence,...

MORE is a tool that assists in eliciting knowledge from domain experts. Acquired information is added to a domain model of qualitative causal relations that may hold among hypotheses, symptoms, and background conditions. After generating diagnostic rules from the domain model, MORE prompts for additional information that would allow a stronger set of diagnostic rules to be generated, MORE'S pri...

Martin and Osswald [15] have recently proposed many generalizations of combination rules on quantitative beliefs in order to manage the conflict and to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since the experts express themselves usually in natural language with linguistic labels, Smarandache and Dezert [13] have introduced a mathematical framework for dealing directly also wit...