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This thesis discusses the ways in which choices are made by an AI planner. A detailed examination is made of the prerequisites for choice making, and a discussion of how the making of good choices can be automated is included. For a given planner, the prerequisites for choice making can be split into two parts: finding the types of choice made during the planning process, and finding the information most relevant to the making of each type of choice. Two means of automatically making "good" choices are described: using general planning policies that have been supplied by the user, and using learned heuristics. These possibilities are explored for a non-hierarchical version of Tate's NONLIN.

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Successfully managing interpersonal relationships requires both pursuing desirable bonds and forgoing those that could be costly. Balancing these goals might be more difficult for some than for others, especially for those with low self-esteem who are motivated to connect, yet stifled by their lack confidence in their abilities to attract desirable dating partners. So, when a potential date’s romantic interest is unambiguous, will they eagerly seize any opportunity to connect, or will the desirability of the person making the request influence their decision? In three laboratory experiments, single, female participants were randomly assigned to receive a romantic overture from an ostensible, single, male who was presented as a desirable or an undesirable dating partner. Independent of whether they accepted or rejected the target’s advances, lower, relative to higher, self-esteem individuals experienced more emotional and cognitive uncertainty and distress before and after making their decision. Desirability of the target moderated some of these effects, such that high self-esteem individuals appropriately distinguished between desirables and undesirables, whereas low self-esteem participants experienced distress at the thought of accepting or rejecting either target. Notably, the actual decisions participants made were unaffected by self-esteem, and driven instead by the extent to which the target was presented as possessing desirable social commodities. Results are discussed with reference to potential mechanisms driving self-esteem differences in balancing the pursuit of quality interpersonal bonds while avoiding costly relations.

Progressive Neuromuscular Diseases (PNDs) are relentless, debilitating, incurable diseases that cause nerves and muscles to atrophy. A large portion of the population who experience PNDs are adolescents. These adolescents progressively lose physical abilities and increasingly rely on caregivers at a time in their life when, paradoxically, normative adolescent development prescribes a move towards independence and autonomy. There is little research examining this experience from the adolescents’ perspectives. The purpose of this interpretive phenomenology study was to understand the experience of adolescents with PNDs when making decisions in relation to their health. Data collection consisted of 10 semi-structured interviews with 5 adolescents, 16-19 years of age, who were living with a PND (two interviews with each of the 5 participants). These interviews lasted an average of 60 minutes. Data were analysed using interpretive strategies, including the development of themes using exemplars, and paradigm cases. Findings revealed that the adolescents separated health decisions into two distinct categories, Big and Small, based upon level of perceived risk and physician involvement. Big referred to high-risk decisions, included physicians, and involved a medical/surgical procedure or intervention. Small referred to lower risk decisions, did not include physicians, and involved personal care. An expert emerged with each category of decision. In Big Decisions, the physician was perceived as the expert who made recommendations, provided information, and introduced the decision. In Small Decisions, the adolescent perceived himself as the expert. With Big Decisions, the physician expertise was typically respected, and the recommendations were followed. With Small Decisions, parents typically respected adolescent expertise. However, the adolescents commonly experienced not having their expertise respected by health professionals. In the context of Big and Small decisions, the theme Joint Ownership captured the sense that with the progressive loss of abilities and resulting dependence, the physical disability and illness were not experienced solely by the adolescent but by the adolescent and his parent(s). As the parent(s) and adolescent shared these experiences, the decisions, ownership of the physical body, and the responsibility for the care of the body also became shared. The findings suggest that health care professionals need to include the adolescents in the Small Decisions, and also acknowledge that adolescents may desire parental involvement in Big Decisions.

Entrepreneurs make decisions that influence subsequent decisions and future performance. The dissertation studies such sequences of decisions by using dynamic programming. This approach allows one to describe the decision process over time and, in some cases, it prescribes how business performance can be improved. An analytical approach helps to contribute a new dimension to entrepreneurship research and it encourages multidisciplinary work by allowing existing methodologies from various (analytical) disciplines to be applied to entrepreneurial problems. The dissertation focuses on research questions that invoke effort allocation in sequential decision-making at early development stages of a new venture creation. The dissertation is composed of three separate research studies. What dominates the entrepreneur's decision process initially is the effort allocation problem in sharing time between an existing job and committing to the new venture. The first study describes how this time-sharing is done and characterizes when is the best time to leave the wage job and become a full-time entrepreneur. I also show that the optimal time-allocation policy is driven by the entrepreneur's tolerance for work and by how returns behave with respect to time allocation in the venture. It is important to understand resource allocations to internal activities such as product development and customer recruitment. The second study focuses on new product development and it investigates how the flow of a new venture's funding affects the development of a new product. I prescribe the optimal release time for the new product and describe how this strategy is affected by the expected amount of funding and its uncertainty. I also identify industrial and entrepreneurial characteristics that generate various behaviors for the rate of change in the return on product quality as investment in the product is increased. The newly developed product must be bought to make the business start-up successful. The third study investigates how an entrepreneur makes decisions over time in allocating effort to building and exploiting a customer base so as to maximize profit. I study what a rational entrepreneur will do when faced with the allocation of effort to different customer categories. I also provide guidelines for improving the performance of an entrepreneur who may not be acting optimally. In these three investigations a dynamic programming approach is utilized to study various sequential decision processes of an entrepreneur during the development process of new venture creation.