BACKGROUND Decisions to adopt a particular innovation may vary between stakeholders because individual stakeholders may disagree on the costs and benefits involved. This may translate to disagreement between stakeholders on priorities in the implementation process, possibly explaining the slow diffusion of innovations in health care. In this study, we explore the differences in stakeholder pref...

Conservation breeding programmes have become an increasingly important tool to save endangered species, yet despite the allocation of significant resources, efforts to create self-sustaining populations have met with limited success. The iconic giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) embodies the struggles associated with ex situ species conservation. Here we show that behavioural mate preferences...

The potential importance of congestion effects on the management and rationing of recreational facilities and services in the presence of heterogeneous preferences were highlighted nearly twenty-five years ago by Freeman and Haveman (1977). While there have been a number of theoretical models extending and expanding upon this work (McConnell 1988; Anderson 1993), empirical research evaluating s...

Despite significant research in the area, many IT projects fail to realize their targets with regards to time, budget or functionality. Resources continue to be committed to projects even though information is available which indicates that they are no longer viable. Prospect theory explains that these decisions can result from the risk preferences of individuals. A framing effect occurs when s...

In this paper, we explore the use of static risk measures from the mathematical finance literature to assess the performance of some standard nonstationary queueing systems. To do this we study two important queueing models, namely the infinite server queue and the multi-server queue with abandonment. We derive exact expressions for the value of many standard risk measures for the M t / M / ∞ ,...

Firms can increase profitability by appropriately motivating managers. We investigate drivers of managerial motivation, and propose how firms can use performance-pay to alter motivational patterns. We focus on the agent’s optimal effort decision in trading off compensation utility with effort cost in a static and dynamic setting. Surprisingly, we find that lower risk aversion or increased pay a...

The distinction between concrete and abstract concepts is psychologically valid but so far it can hardly be quantified in any objective way, which prevents it from being further studied in computational linguistics. This paper proposes a systematic way to measure concreteness from the surface structure of dictionary definitions. Comparing the scores from WordNet definitions with human ratings, ...

In most developed countries, gender equality and neutrality have been widely promoted and embraced— through public policy—as a socio-cultural goal since at least the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, we predicted that a population of highly educated youth from a relatively wealthy developed country (mostly students from a Canadian university) would display little or no significant gender bias...

Food manufacturers need to understand the taste preferences of their consumers in order to develop successful new products. The existence of consumer segments that differ in systematic ways in their taste preferences can have important implications for product development. Rather than developing a product to please all potential consumers, the manufacturer may decide to optimize the product for...