T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...

BACKGROUND Advance care planning (ACP) is the process of planning for future healthcare that is facilitated by a trained healthcare professional, whereby a person's values, beliefs and treatment preferences are made known to guide clinical decision-making at a future time when they cannot communicate their decisions. Despite the potential benefits of ACP for community aged care clients the avai...

Purpose: Nurse managers’ behaviors and job satisfaction are commonly addressed in the literature; however, registered nurse perceptions of nurse manager behaviors provide a unique perspective that may inform future strategies designed to enhance RN job satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptions of registered nurses that were explored through focus groups to learn the ...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...

This paper describes a method for planning with rich qualitative, temporally extended preferences (QTEPs) using lookahead heuristics inspired by those employed in state-of-the-art classical planners. Key to our approach is a transformation of the planning domain into an equivalent but simplified planning domain. First, compound preference formulae are transformed into simpler, equivalent prefer...

We consider voting over combinatorial domains, where alternatives are binary tuples. We assume that votes are specified as conditionally lexicographic preferences, or LP trees. We study aggregation problems of LP tree votes for several positional scoring rules. Our main goal is to demonstrate that answer-set programming can be effective in solving the winner and the evaluation problems for inst...

This article tries to explain the exceptional levels of knowledge creation in certain industrial clusters, levels that are seemingly higher than what is implied by the usual models of atomistic agents who do not internalize externalities. For this purpose, we introduce reference-dependent utility into an OLG model of an industrial cluster where agents allocate resources between consumption and ...

Core-selection is a crucial property of social choice functions, or rules, in social choice literature. It is also desirable to address the incentive of agents to cheat by misreporting their preferences. This paper investigates an exchange problem where each agent may have multiple indivisible goods, agents’ preferences over sets of goods are assumed to be lexicographic, and side payments are n...