Abstract: This study suggests the possibility of application of utility theory to causal inference. Arai (2011) has shown that people tend to think causality stronger when they are involved in the task than when they are not. Therefore we attempted to explain the effect of ego-involvement on causal reasoning by gain and loss. Two hundreds and thirty-five university students inferred the relatio...

Social feedback has long been recognized as an important element of successful health-related behavior change. However, most of the existing studies look at the effect that offline social feedback has. This paper fills gaps in the literature by proposing a framework to study the causal effect that receiving social support in the form of comments in an online weight loss community has on (i) the...

The Application Service Provision (ASP) model offers a new form of IS/IT resource management option for which the vendor remotely provides the usage of applications over a network. Currently, the ASP industry appears to be more vendor-driven. But without a good understanding of how the ASP offerings might appeal to prospective customers, the industry might not survive. This study investigates e...

First, let me congratulate both authors on two fine papers which illuminate important aspects of causal inference. I have only a little to say about Professor Arjas’ paper which specifically illuminates the aspect of time and causality in an excellent way. I will therefore concentrate on the concepts described by Professor Rubin which seem to be more controversial, thus lending themselves direc...

Bayesian knowledge bases (BKBs) are a gen­ eralization of Bayes networks and weighted proof graphs (WAODAGs), that allow cycles in the causal graph. Reasoning in BKBs re­ quires finding the most probable inferences consistent with the evidence. The cost­ sharing heuristic for finding least-cost ex­ planations in WAODAGs was presented and shown to be effective by Charniak and Hu­ sain. However, ...

Recent studies suggest that humans can infer the underlying causal model from observing the distribution of variables. In a multiple-cue experiment we investigated if people can infer the causal structure from mere observation, and if different causal models invite different cognitive processes. Participants performed 220 training trials in two judgment tasks with different underlying causal st...

Scientific practice typically involves repeatedly studying a system, each time trying to unravel a different perspective. In each study, the scientist may take measurements under different experimental conditions (interventions, manipulations, perturbations) and measure different sets of quantities (variables). The result is a collection of heterogeneous data sets coming from different data dis...

Long-term healthcare organisations significantly benefit from Knowledge Management (KM). However, the extant literature has little empirical support for this statement. Using the KM instrument developed by Bontis and Fitz-enz (2002), this paper extends prior studies by evaluating behaviours within a not-for-profit context over several years. As such, it tests a comprehensive causal model that i...

The 2003 survey among Slovenian companies was studying the factors affecting the formal evaluation of e-business projects. The corresponding causal model revealed that the perceptions and the attitudes towards e-business strongly affect the corresponding evaluation practice. In particular, the recognition of the needs for corresponding evaluation had the strongest effect. On the other hand, the...

The Hirsch-index is an index for measuring and comparing the output of researchers. Under the condition of monotonicity, Woeginger [7] provides a characterization of the Hirsch-index by three axioms in 2008. Replacing monotonicity by expansion consistency, we characterize the Hirsch-index by only two of Woeginger’s axioms. Besides, we also introduce an axiom contraction consistency. It is a dua...