Thesis (M.S. in Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES))--Naval Postgraduate School, Sept. 2001. / Thesis advisors: Hiles, John ; Darken, Rudolph. "September 2001." Includes bibliographical references (p. 59). Also Available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Julie R. Irwin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-99). Also available in electronic version.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 404-425). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Today most organizations define job responsibilities less clearly than they did in the past. Additionally, increasing emphasis on personal initiative, empowerment, and self-management places a higher burden on workers to control their own activities. As such, decisions about whether to perform discretionary helping tasks, such as requested favors, is an important issue that faces all working professionals as they try to balance the many divergent demands on their time. This dissertation focuses on how individuals make decisions regarding whether to agree to favor requests, defined as “discretionary, prosocial behavior that is performed in response to a specific, explicit request from one person to another,” in the workplace. I show favors—because they are externally requested—are phenomenologically distinct from in-role behaviors and voluntary helping behaviors. I examine favor requests from the perspective of the performer to identify the motivations that influence responses to favor requests. I consider how favor decision-making—both the factors that people consider as well as the decision outcome— changes across individuals and situations. The dissertation contains three papers that contribute to this goal. Paper 1 defines favors and favor requests, distinguishes them from other workplace helping behaviors, and proposes a framework of the motivational processes of favor request decisions. Paper 2 provides an empirical test of the motivational framework proposed in Paper 1. Paper 3 examines the relationship among helping context, comparing favors versus volunteerism, gender, and guilt proneness. Overall, this stream of research is intended to develop an understanding of how people behave when confronted with favor requests.

One basic requisite for rationality is that choices are consistent across situations. Animals commonly violate rationality premises as evidenced, for example, by context-dependent choices, and such apparent irrationalities stand as paradoxes that instigate re-examination of some assumptions in behaviour ecological modelling. The goal of the present thesis was to study the psychological mechanisms underlying apparent irrationalities in order to assess the functional implications of general processes of valuation and choice. A common thread through the different studies is the hypothesis that most animal 'irrationalities' are due to misinterpretation of what the optimum would be in natural circumstances, and hence of the maximised currency in the theoretical predictions. I believe that the trait that may have been of paramount influence in many organisms' selective history was the ability to learn about the predictability of events and their biological value, and that this is implemented in an overriding force of associative learning mechanisms. In chapters 2 and 3, I present evidence of context-dependent foraging choices in European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, in the laboratory, and I implement a version of the Rescorla- Wagner learning model to account for both present data and apparent irrationalities reported by other authors. In chapter 4, I test the notion that context dependence may in fact be adaptive when animals face sequential choices, namely when they have to decide whether to take a prey item or to skip it in order to search for better alternatives. In chapter 5, I explore the functional implications of starlings' relative responding to incentives during an unexpected shortfall in reinforcement, and I also examine the extent to which information about the new environmental status helps them avoid energetic and time costs commonly seen in uninformed individuals. Last, in chapter 6, I present a brief summary of the main discussions considered and conclusions reached along this thesis.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 65 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1968. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.