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The understanding of how households make decisions may improve the success of an economic development program and enhance targeted training efforts. Technology adoption and farm management decisions depend on household decision making. If a relevant decision maker can be clearly identified and specifically trained to meet his or her needs, the development program may be enhanced. Many approaches have been developed to help understand household decision making processes and the responses to household surveys provide the basis for many such approaches. Survey questions are often asked of a single person, and proxy responses are commonly used. Though potential bias from proxy responses is well documented, there is less information regarding the relationship between the proxy and his or her characteristics and the veracity of responses to subjective questions like who makes decisions within the household or who is in charge of major responsibilities. This paper employs the methods of mining contrast-set (Bay and Pazzani, 1999, 2001) and association rule (Agrawal et al., 1993) to answer the general question of whether and under what conditions proxy responses to survey questions are acceptable in a rural area of Ecuador. It also analyzes how factors such as gender of the respondent matters and how other factors affect the suitability of using proxy responses. The findings show that gender matters for farm-household decision making in rural Ecuador. For instance, more male than female respondents are likely to claim that they are responsible for household decision-making. Respondents answer differently not only to some subjective questions such as who sells crops, but also to objective survey question such as the number of female workers in a family. Factors such as the age of the respondent are found to influence responses about certain activities such as preparing and applying pesticides. The pattern of responses to both objective and subjective questions as well as the effect on responses by characteristics differ by areas where the survey is conducted, etc.. / Master of Science

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 O86 / Master of Science

The purpose of this study was to examine agreement of husbands and of wives as groups and to explore differences in responses within individual couples in the house purchasing decision participation relative to items comprising investment value of housing. The sample consisted of 144 married couples between the ages of 30 and 60 who had purchased their house jointly and resided in the Tucson SMSA. Non-parametric tests were used to analyze the data. The Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance measured agreement of husbands and wives as groups. The McNemar Test was used to examine significant differences in responses within individual couples. Results of this study found that for items tested in this study that husbands and wives do agree when making house purchasing decisions. Wives tended to respond with a higher perceived participation score both for self and spousal responses than did their respective husband. Twelve significant differences were found.

When primates make decisions about sensory signals, their choices are biased by the costs and benefits associated with different possible outcomes. However, much remains unknown about the neuronal mechanisms by which reward information is integrated into the perceptual decision-making process. I used electrophysiological, psychophysical and imaging techniques to explore the effect of reward on sensory representations, whilst humans and monkeys made perceptual judgements about structure-from-motion (SFM) stimuli. Electrical microstimulation of visual area V5/MT in the macaque monkey was used to bias per- ceptual judgements, under different available reward sizes for correct choices. The behavioural effect of microstimulation interacted with available reward, and, in the context of a drift diffu- sion model of decision-making, the results demonstrated that reward must influence sensory processing before visual signals and micro stimulation signals are accumulated in sensorimotor areas. In a parallel human psychophysics experiment, viewers made decisions about SFM stim- uti whilst their choices were biased towards one outcome or the other by unequal pay-offs. A full drift -diffusion model was fitted to human choice and reaction time data. There was a signif- icant effect of reward on model drift rate, a parameter known to be dependent upon evidence represented in sensory brain regions. A second set of experiments used magneto encephalography (MEG) to explore activity in visual , areas in human cortex and the effects of reward. Brain responses to retinotopic visual stimuli were localized with three different MEG source analysis methods, and localization accuracy was evaluated by comparison with fMRI maps obtained in the same individuals. The results demon- strated that the beamformer and minimum norm estimate (MNE) methods were most suitable for investigating early visual activity with MEG. Human brain activity was then recorded with MEG whilst viewers made perceptual judgements about SFM stimuli, under unequal pay-offs. The results revealed an effect of reward size on early MEG responses in the region of the occipi- tal cortex and visual precuneus. Taken together, the experiments presented in this thesis provide consistent evidence that in- formation about reward can influence the processing of sensory information during perceptual decisions.