The paper explores the elements that constitute women’s autonomy in rural Pakistan. Hitherto most research on women’s status in Pakistan has either been restricted to proxy measures of women’s status generally or to the urban areas. Community or region, each of which has distinctive features, have an overriding influence on this subject. Northern Punjabi women have lower economic autonomy but g...

Research on adjustable autonomy (AA) is critical if we are to deploy multiagent systems in support of important human activities. Through AA, an agent can dynamically vary its level of autonomy — harnessing human abilities when needed, but also limiting such interaction. While most previous AA work has focused on individual agent-human interactions, this paper focuses on agent teams embedded in...

In healthcare ethics, autonomy has arguably become the ‘principal principle’. As a principle that can be readily turned into a process, the giving of ‘informed consent’ by a patient has become the surrogate measure of whether medical interventions are ethically acceptable. While ‘informed consent’ processes in medical care are presumed to be robust, research confirms that most patients do not a...

Adjustable autonomy refers to agents’ dynamically varying their own autonomy, transferring decision making control to other entities (typically human users) in key situations. Determining whether and when such transfers of control must occur is arguably the fundamental research question in adjustable autonomy. Previous work, often focused on individual agent-human interactions, has provided sev...

Various models for cooperative organisational networks exist. The obvious differentiation is the structure of the networks. But these models, sometimes implicitly, assume different levels of autonomy of the network partner. This paper compares a number of such models. Depending on properties of the problem at hand that requires a decision, different models are preferable. Decision Support Syste...

Despite enthusiasm for patient-centered care, the practice of patient-centered care is proving challenging. Further, it is curious that the literature about this subject does not explicitly address patient autonomy, since (1) patients guide care in patient-centered care, and (2) respect for patient autonomy is a prominent health-care value. We argue that by explicitly adopting a relational conc...

PURPOSE The contribution of bioethics to clinical care at the end of life (EOL) deserves critical scrutiny. We argue that researchers have rarely questioned the normative power of autonomy-based bioethics practices. Research on the ethical dimensions of EOL decision making has focused on an idealized discourse of patient "choice" that requires patients to embrace their dying to receive excellen...