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It was hypothesized that in a decision-making situation, individuals will not only think of an optimal alternative but also as the most promising alternative, choose the alternative that is closest to their optimal alternative. Therefore, based on participants’ optimal alternative, five alternatives, each equal in terms of constant Multi-attribute Utility, were presented to participants. Two of the alternatives were constructed to be most similar to the participant’s optimal alternative, two alternatives were associated with two non-compensatory rules, and one alternative was not linked to any decision making rule. Results showed that participants thought not only of an optimal alternative in the given decision-making situation, they also chose the alternative that was most similar to their optimal. This alternative also got highest preference ratings. These findings present an optimal alternative. In addition, they demonstrate the influence that such an alternative have on the outcome in a decision-making situation.

This thesis focuses on palliative cancer care in acute care hospitals and home care settings. The overall aim was to generate a grounded theory explaining the latent patterns of behavior of patients, relatives and nurses. The thesis includes one population-based study with cross-sectional design and four classic grounded theory studies. Study I was conducted in two acute care hospitals. In this 5-year follow-up study, the proportion of hospitalized palliative cancer patients had decreased. The patients were older with more symptoms and care needs per patient. In both years, the most common symptoms were pain and deterioration and the most common cancer sites were prostate and colorectal. The results showed that associations between symptoms, care needs and cancer site were mostly weak. In study II, striving for emotional survival emerged as the pattern of behavior through which nurses in acute care hospitals deal with their main concern, the risk of being emotionally overloaded. Striving for emotional survival involves emotional shielding, emotional processing and emotional postponing. In study III, doing good care emerged as the pattern of behavior through which nurses in home care deal with their main concern, their desire to give good care. Doing good care involves three different caring behaviors: anticipatory caring, momentary caring and stagnated caring.     In study IV, living on hold emerged as the pattern of behavior through which patients and relatives deal with their main concern, being put on hold. Living on hold involves three modes: fighting, adjusting and surrendering. The overall theory, deciphering unwritten rules, explains how patients, relatives and nurses are dealing with the uncertainty of how to act and behave.   Deciphering unwritten rules involves figuring out, deliberating, maneuvering and evaluating. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the complexities of palliative cancer care and the importance of knowledge, resources and counseling. Patients should be cared for at the right care level according to their care needs and the care focus should be on treating symptoms irrespective of the diagnosis. The palliative care approach therefore needs to be implemented in all caring contexts with dying people.

Bakgrund: Trots tydliga föreskrifter om basala hygienrutiner följs dessa inte alltid av personal på vårdavdelningar. Studier visar att orsaken till detta beror på olika faktorer. Syfte: Att undersöka kunskapen om, samt följsamheten till Socialstyrelsens föreskrifter om basala hygienrutiner hos undersköterskor, sjuksköterskor och läkare på ett universitetssjukhus i Mellansverige. Metod: En kvantitativ studie med deskriptiv och jämförande design. Datainsamlingen skedde med hjälp av ett observationsprotokoll samt en enkätundersökning. Antal medverkande i observationsmomentet var 93 deltagare respektive 81 i enkätundersökningen.  Data analyserades med ANOVA samt deskriptivt statistik. Resultat: Samtliga professioner hade relativt god kunskap gällande kunskapsfrågorna samt ansåg att kunskap är viktigt. Bristande kunskaper sågs gällande handdesinfektion samt regler för naglar och armbandsur. Gällande arbetskläder och håruppsättning var följsamheten god bland samtliga professioner. Gällande följsamheten i patientnära kontakt var följsamheten relativt god men skillnader inom olika områden kunde ses. Tidspress och placering av hygienprodukter visades påverka hur följsamheten sköts. Slutsats: Studien visar att följsamheten till de basala hygienrutinerna i helhet är relativt god bland professionerna. Dock ses brister vilket tyder på att kunskapen är otillräcklig. Ökad kunskap och förbättrad följsamhet kan leda till kortare vårdtider, minskat antal vårdrelaterade infektioner samt en ökad patientsäkerhet. / Background: Despite clear basic hygiene rules, the adherence is poor among healthcare workers. Previous studies have shown that this depends on several factors. Aim: To examine certified nursing assistants´, registered nurses´ and doctors´ knowledge and adherence of the basic hygiene rules at a teaching hospital in central Sweden. Method: A quantitative study with descriptive and comparative design was chosen. The data was collected using an observation protocol and a questionnaire. Number of participants in the observation was 93 persons and 81 persons in the questionnaire. The data was analyzed using ANOVA and descriptive statistics. Results: All participants had relatively good knowledge regarding the basic hygiene rules and they found the subject important. Lack of knowledge was seen regarding the use of hand disinfectants and in the use of wristwatches and rules for nails. Regarding rules for clothes and hair, adherence was good to the basic hygiene rules among all participants. In contact with the patient, adherence was relatively good. Time pressure and placement of hygiene products have been shown to affect compliance. Conclusion: The overall result shows that adherence to the basic hygiene rules is relatively high among all professions. Faults were seen due to lack of knowledge. Increased knowledge and improved adherence to the basic hygiene rules can result in shorter hospitalization, decreased nosocomial infections and increased patient safety.

This essay discusses children’s rights and control and system of rules in HVB-homes that provide treatment for adolescences with drug abuse prob­lems or criminal behavior. The results of this study are based on interviews with four persons working in managerial positions on different HVB-homes and shows the difficulties of having a children’s rights perspective in a con­text where a higher level of control is necessary to protect the best interest of the child. The study suggests that the question of balance between children’s right and the need for controlling system of rules needs to be fur­ther dis­cussed to improve, and as far as possible guarantee that these adoles­cence receive best possible care and do not suffer unfair restrictions on liber­ties.

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Le projet d'écriture de Bret Easton Ellis constitue un point aveugle dans l'horizon critique actuel. Pour pallier ce manque, nous nous penchons dans ce mémoire sur l'esthétique pragmatique particulièrement complexe (ou « scrappy », selon la définition de Barbara Herrnstein Smith; 1988) du personnage et de la communication chez Ellis afin de définir son projet d'écriture comme expérience de « descente dans le chaos », expression développée par Maria L. Assad (1991) à partir des réflexions de Thomas M. Kavanagh (1986) sur Les cinq sens de Michel Serres (1985). Pour ce faire, nous proposons une micro-lecture attentive du deuxième roman d'Ellis, The Rules of Attraction (1987), suivie d'un bref retour sur les cinq autres romans de l'auteur. Afin d'effectuer notre micro-lecture, nous avons mis sur pied une grille de lecture construite à l'aide des théories de la pragmatique de la communication et de l'identité empruntées aux sciences sociales, en nous concentrant essentiellement sur les pratiques narratives de l'identité et les états problématiques de la communication. Cette grille a été appliquée au roman grâce au logiciel d'analyse de discours NVivo 8 (approche de codification vivante). Les résultats obtenus ont été interprétés à partir d'une approche libre inspirée des études littéraires et largement informée par les théories des chaoticiens. Cela nous permet de montrer comment il est possible de faire appel à la pragmatique des personnages pour saisir leurs textures différenciées. Il apparaît alors que la pragmatique du personnage ellisien participe d'une esthétique disjonctive de la communication qui se répercute sur l'esthétique générale du texte comme « descente dans le chaos ». L'étude des autres aspects du roman d'Ellis (métadiscours, incipit et excipit, exergue, titre) vient confirmer l'influence des « chaotiques » (Hayles, 1991) sur le projet d'écriture ellisien, point de départ pour repenser The Rules of Attraction comme un jalon important dans le développement d'une écriture et d'une œuvre qui exploitent les possibilités narratives et culturelles du chaos. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Ellis Bret Easton, The Rules of Attraction, Pragmatique, Théorie du personnage, Chaos

The first chapter is based on a paper with Jin Li in fair division. It was recently discovered that on the domain of Leontief preferences, Hurwicz (1972)'s classic impossibility result does not hold; that is, one can find efficient, strategy-proof and individually rational rules to divide resources among agents. Here we consider the problem of dividing l divisible goods among n agents with the generalized Leontief preferences. We propose and characterize the class of generalized egalitarian rules which satisfy efficiency, group strategy-proofness, anonymity, resource monotonicity, population monotonicity, envy-freeness and consistency. On the Leontief domain, our rules generalize the egalitarian-equivalent rules with reference bundles. We also extend our rules to agent-specific and endowment-specific egalitarian rules. The former is a larger class of rules satisfying all the previous properties except anonymity and envy-freeness. The latter is a class of efficient, group strategy-proof, anonymous and individually rational rules when the resources are assumed to be privately owned. The second and third chapters are based on two working papers of mine in decision making under uncertainty. In the second chapter, I study the wealth effect under uncertainty --- how the wealth level impacts a decision maker's degree of uncertainty aversion. I axiomatize a class of preferences displaying decreasing absolute uncertainty aversion, which allows a decision maker to be more willing to take uncertainty-bearing behavior when he becomes wealthier. Three equivalent preference representations are obtained. The first is a variation on the constraint criterion of Hansen and Sargent (2001). The other two respectively generalize Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989)'s maxmin criterion and Maccheroni, Marinacci and Rustichini (2006)'s variational representation. This class, when restricted to preferences exhibiting constant absolute uncertainty aversion, is exactly Maccheroni, Marinacci and Rustichini (2006)'s ariational preferences. Thus, the results further enable us to establish relationships among the representations for several important classes within variational preferences. The three representations provide different decision rules to rationalize the same class of preferences. The three decision rules correspond to three ways which are proposed in the literature to identify a decision maker's perception about uncertainty and his attitude toward uncertainty. However, I give examples to show that these identifications conflict with each other. It means that there is much freedom in eliciting two unobservable and subjective factors, one's perception about and attitude toward uncertainty, from only his choice behavior. This exactly motivates the work in Chapter 3. In the third chapter, I introduce confidence orders in addition to preference orders. Axioms are imposed on both orders to reveal a decision maker's perception about uncertainty and to characterize the following decision rule. A decision maker evaluates an act based on his aspiration and his confidence in this aspiration. Each act corresponds to a trade-off line between the two criteria: The more he aspires, the less his confidence in achieving the aspiration level. The decision maker ranks an act by the optimal combination of aspiration and confidence on its trade-off line according to an aggregating preference of his over the two-criterion plane. The aggregating preference indicates his uncertainty attitude, while his perception about uncertainty is summarized by a generalized second-order belief over the prior space, and this belief is revealed by his confidence order.

Fair division is the problem of dividing one or several goods among a set of agents in a way that satisfies a suitable fairness criterion. Traditionally studied in economics, philosophy, and political science, fair division has drawn a lot of attention from the multiagent systems community, since this field is strongly concerned about how a surplus (or a cost) should be divided among a group of agents. Arguably, the Shapley value is the single most important contribution to the problem of fair division. It assigns to each agent a share of the resource equal to the expected marginal contribution of that agent. Thus, it is implicitly assumed that individual marginal contributions can be objectively computed. In this thesis, we propose a game-theoretic model for sharing a joint reward when the quality of individual contributions is subjective. In detail, we consider scenarios where a group has been formed and has accomplished a task for which it is granted a reward, which must be shared among the group members. After observing the contribution of the peers in accomplishing the task, each agent is asked to provide evaluations for the others. Mainly to facilitate the sharing process, agents can also be requested to provide predictions about how their peers are evaluated. These subjective opinions are elicited and aggregated by a central, trusted entity, called the mechanism, which is also responsible for sharing the reward based exclusively on the received opinions. Besides the formal game-theoretic model for sharing rewards based on subjective opinions, we propose three different mechanisms in this thesis. Our first mechanism, the peer-evaluation mechanism, divides the reward proportionally to the evaluations received by the agents. We show that this mechanism is fair, budget-balanced, individually rational, and strategy-proof, but that it can be collusion-prone. Our second mechanism, the peer-prediction mechanism, shares the reward by considering two aspects: the evaluations received by the agents and their truth-telling scores. To compute these scores, this mechanism uses a strictly proper scoring rule. Under the assumption that agents are Bayesian decision-makers, we show that this mechanism is weakly budget-balanced, individually rational, and incentive-compatible. Further, we present approaches that guarantee the mechanism to be collusion-resistant and fair. Our last mechanism, the BTS mechanism, is the only one to elicit both evaluations and predictions from the agents. It considers the evaluations received by the agents and their truth-telling scores when sharing the reward. For computing the scores, it uses the Bayesian truth serum method, a powerful scoring method based on the surprisingly common criterion. Under the assumptions that agents are Bayesian decision-makers, and that the population of agents is sufficiently large so that a single evaluation cannot significantly affect the empirical distribution of evaluations, we show that this mechanism is incentive-compatible, budget-balanced, individually rational, and fair.

<p> Probability forecasts play an important role in many decision and risk analysis applications. Research and practice over the years have shown that the shift towards distributional forecasts provides a more accurate and appropriate means of capturing risk in models for these applications. This means that mathematical tools for analyzing the quality of these forecasts, may it come from experts, models or data, become important to the decision maker. In this regard, strictly proper scoring rules have been widely studied because of their ability to encourage assessors to provide truthful reports. This dissertation contributes to the scoring rule literature in two main areas of assessment - probability forecasts and quantile assessments. </p><p>In the area of probability assessment, scoring rules typically studied in the literature, and commonly used in practice, evaluate probability assessments relative to a default uniform measure. In many applications, the uniform baseline used to represent some notion of ignorance is inappropriate. In this dissertation, we generalize the power and pseudospherical family of scoring rules, two large parametric families of commonly-used scoring rules, by incorporating the notion of a non-uniform baseline distribution for both the discrete and continuous cases. With an appropriate normalization and choice of parameters, we show that these new families of scoring rules relate to various well-known divergence measures from information theory and to well-founded decision models when framed in an expected utility maximization context. </p><p>In applications where the probability space considered has an ordinal ranking between states, an important property often considered is sensitivity to distance. Scoring rules with this property provide higher scores to assessments that allocate higher probability mass to events “closer” to that which occurs based on some notion of distance. In this setting, we provide an approach that allows us to generate new sensitive to distance strictly proper scoring rules from well-known strictly proper binary scoring rules. Through the use of the weighted scoring rules, we also show that these new scores can incorporate a specified baseline distribution, in addition to being strictly proper and sensitive to distance. </p><p>In the inverse problem of quantile assessment, scoring rules have not yet been well-studied and well-developed. We examine the differences between scoring rules for probability and quantile assessments, and demonstrate why the tools that have been developed for probability assessments no longer encourage truthful reporting when used for quantile assessments. In addition, we shed light on new properties and characterizations for some of these rules that could guide decision makers trying to choosing an appropriate scoring rule. </p> / Dissertation