Real estate development involves many complex, dynamic, and uncertain elements. In the pre-development stage, greater uncertainties result from the fact that the space being considered has not yet been created. Considering both the inherent characteristics of the real estate and the inefficiency of the market it operates in, any aid in the investment decision process is believed to add to the quality of the end product. This being the case, most, if not all, of the development companies make office development decisions using some kind of a procedure in the pre-development stage. However low occupancy rates and long payback periods that are being faced, even by the most recently completed Class A office projects in Turkey, show that there are serious deficiencies in these applied procedures and that they lack the necessary and important components of project feasibility analysis, which are basically the market and financial feasibility analysis, that needs to be applied in the pre-development stage of the office development process. That is why this study’s purpose is to explore and identify the deficiencies of the decision-making models currently used by Turkish real estate development companies in the pre-development stage of office development projects and to recommend necessary additions and/or deletions for the enhancement of these company models. To do so, this research involved interviews of ten office developers to identify their go/no-go decision processes in evaluating office developments in Istanbul, Turkey. The study has found that developers tend to fall under three different groups, each following different models: Group I includes exclusively construction companies, Group II includes mixed companies and Group III includes exclusively real estate investment companies. Furthermore, the research has found that similarities and differences among these three groups involve the following: While investment companies seek opportunities based on market research, decisions by construction companies are driven by the availability of land swaps. All three groups emphasize land availability and related title and land-use issues. Although unit-sale continues, there is a gradual shift to income property with the aid of improvement in the financial market, which is also reflected in the decision-making models being used.

While extant research on recruiting has highlighted a number of applicant attitudes that predict future attitudes and decisions, questions regarding how attitudes develop over time and differentially predict applicant job choice have received scant attention. To address this currently impoverished research area, this study utilizes three prominent recruitment frameworks (signaling theory, fit, and image) to theoretically and empirically examine how applicant attitudes towards possible future employers develop over the course of the recruitment process. Also, this study explores the possible divergent patterns of development of these applicant attitudes by examining taking a job offer and passing on a job offer as two separate decision-making processes. Finally, this study investigates the pattern of relationships between proximal predictors of job choice (organizational attraction and acceptance intentions) and applicant decisions to take or pass on a job offer. Participants in this study were 178 undergraduates seeking internships during a five-month recruitment period. Applicant attitudes about organizational image, fit, attraction, acceptance intentions as well as recruiter trustworthiness and timeliness of a consistent set of firms were assessed eight times over the five-month period. Results of this study indicate that recruiting, from an applicant perspective, is a dynamic decision-making process where applicants gather and assimilate information in distinct patterns prior to making job choice decisions. Specifically, across six applicant attitudes that have previously been shown to predict recruiting outcomes such as job choice, applicant attitudes toward the organization they take an offer from increase, and at a faster rate, over time relative to organizations whose offers they pass. These attitudes significantly differ between offers that are ultimately taken and passed on as early as the start of the recruitment process (i.e. image) or as late as slightly more than three weeks (i.e. fit) into a five-month recruitment process.

Objective: To understand the experiences of the dialysis decision-making process from the perspective of the significant other, specifically their role, influencing factors and the supportive interventions of the interprofessional team. Method: An interpretive description qualitative study was conducted using individual interviews and results were triangulated with decisional conflict and decisional regret quantitative results. Results: Ten participants described their role as advocating, providing a positive outlook, ‘being with’ the patient, learning together, sharing opinions, and communicating about values, preferences, feasibility of options. Environmental factors that influenced decision making included unexpected life change, choosing life, and personal health problems. Factors related to implementation of the treatment modality decision were unanticipated events, relationship changes, recreational travel changes, and the caregiver role. Nursing interventions are required to realign treatment expectations. Relevance: Significant others have an important role in supporting the patient making the dialysis decision and are often instrumental in implementing the decision.

Objective: To explore interventions that support children and parents making health decisions. Systematic Review: A systematic review was conducted to synthesize evidence on interventions that support children’s health decision making. Five studies of variable quality were included. Interventions that improved decision making were decision coaching with or without an educational resource, or education alone. Pre-/post-test pilot: A pre-/post-test study evaluated the feasibility and acceptability of decision coaching guided by the Ottawa Family Decision Guide for children with type 1 diabetes and their parents. Of 16 families invited, 7 participated. Compared to children/parents who preferred one option at baseline, participants who were unsure of the best option rated decision coaching as more acceptable and had larger decreases in decisional conflict. Conclusions: Few studies have evaluated interventions supporting children’s decision making. The piloted decision support intervention was feasible and acceptable, particularly with children and parents who were unsure of the best option.

In this thesis, we present a decision-theoretic framework for building decision support systems that incrementally elicit preferences of individual users over multiattribute outcomes and then provide recommendations based on the acquired preference information. By combining decision-theoretically sound modeling with effective computational techniques and certain user-centric considerations, we demonstrate the feasibility and potential of practical autonomous preference elicitation and recommendation systems. More concretely, we focus on decision scenarios in which a user can obtain any outcome from a finite set of available outcomes. The outcome is space is multiattribute; each outcome can be viewed as an instantiation of a set of attributes with finite domains. The user has preferences over outcomes that can be represented by a utility function. We assume that user preferences are generalized additively independent (GAI), and, therefore, can be represented by a GAI utility function. GAI utilities provide a flexible representation framework for structured preferences over multiattribute outcomes; they are less restrictive and, therefore, more widely applicable than additive utilities. In many decision scenarios with large and complex decision spaces (such as making travel plans or choosing an apartment to rent from thousands of available options), selecting the optimal decision can require a lot of time and effort on the part of the user. Since obtaining the user's complete utility function is generally infeasible, the decision support system has to support recommendation with partial preference information. We provide solutions for effective elicitation of GAI utilities in situations where a probabilistic prior about the user's utility function is available, and in situations where the system's uncertainty about user utilities is represented by maintaining a set of feasible user utilities. In the first case, we use Bayesian criteria for decision making and query selection. In the second case, recommendations (and query strategies) are based on the robust minimax regret criterion which recommends the outcome with the smallest maximum regret (with respect to all adversarial instantiations of feasible utility functions). Our proposed framework is implemented in the UTPref recommendation system that searches multiattribute product databases using the minimax regret criterion. UTPref is tested with a study involving 40 users interacting with the system. The study measures the effectiveness of regret-based elicitation, evaluates user comprehension and acceptance of minimax regret, and assesses the relative difficulty of different query types.

The present pair of studies tested the hypothesis that romantic investments are reciprocal, such that the investments made by one romantic partner motivate continued investment from the other partner. In Study 1, participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario involving a failing relationship, in which romantic investment was experimentally manipulated. High investments made by a romantic partner predicted continued relationship perseverance. In Study 2, participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to recall their own investments,their current partner‘s investments, or skip directly to the dependent measures (control). Participants who recalled their partners‘ investments reported higher intentions to continue to invest in their relationships. This effect was mediated by higher feelings of gratitude toward the partner and by increased feelings of trust in the romantic partner. The role of gratitude in particular suggests prosocial emotions and processes are an important factor in relationship decision making.

The present pair of studies tested the hypothesis that romantic investments are reciprocal, such that the investments made by one romantic partner motivate continued investment from the other partner. In Study 1, participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario involving a failing relationship, in which romantic investment was experimentally manipulated. High investments made by a romantic partner predicted continued relationship perseverance. In Study 2, participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to recall their own investments,their current partner‘s investments, or skip directly to the dependent measures (control). Participants who recalled their partners‘ investments reported higher intentions to continue to invest in their relationships. This effect was mediated by higher feelings of gratitude toward the partner and by increased feelings of trust in the romantic partner. The role of gratitude in particular suggests prosocial emotions and processes are an important factor in relationship decision making.

In this thesis, we present a decision-theoretic framework for building decision support systems that incrementally elicit preferences of individual users over multiattribute outcomes and then provide recommendations based on the acquired preference information. By combining decision-theoretically sound modeling with effective computational techniques and certain user-centric considerations, we demonstrate the feasibility and potential of practical autonomous preference elicitation and recommendation systems. More concretely, we focus on decision scenarios in which a user can obtain any outcome from a finite set of available outcomes. The outcome is space is multiattribute; each outcome can be viewed as an instantiation of a set of attributes with finite domains. The user has preferences over outcomes that can be represented by a utility function. We assume that user preferences are generalized additively independent (GAI), and, therefore, can be represented by a GAI utility function. GAI utilities provide a flexible representation framework for structured preferences over multiattribute outcomes; they are less restrictive and, therefore, more widely applicable than additive utilities. In many decision scenarios with large and complex decision spaces (such as making travel plans or choosing an apartment to rent from thousands of available options), selecting the optimal decision can require a lot of time and effort on the part of the user. Since obtaining the user's complete utility function is generally infeasible, the decision support system has to support recommendation with partial preference information. We provide solutions for effective elicitation of GAI utilities in situations where a probabilistic prior about the user's utility function is available, and in situations where the system's uncertainty about user utilities is represented by maintaining a set of feasible user utilities. In the first case, we use Bayesian criteria for decision making and query selection. In the second case, recommendations (and query strategies) are based on the robust minimax regret criterion which recommends the outcome with the smallest maximum regret (with respect to all adversarial instantiations of feasible utility functions). Our proposed framework is implemented in the UTPref recommendation system that searches multiattribute product databases using the minimax regret criterion. UTPref is tested with a study involving 40 users interacting with the system. The study measures the effectiveness of regret-based elicitation, evaluates user comprehension and acceptance of minimax regret, and assesses the relative difficulty of different query types.

Objective: To understand the experiences of the dialysis decision-making process from the perspective of the significant other, specifically their role, influencing factors and the supportive interventions of the interprofessional team. Method: An interpretive description qualitative study was conducted using individual interviews and results were triangulated with decisional conflict and decisional regret quantitative results. Results: Ten participants described their role as advocating, providing a positive outlook, ‘being with’ the patient, learning together, sharing opinions, and communicating about values, preferences, feasibility of options. Environmental factors that influenced decision making included unexpected life change, choosing life, and personal health problems. Factors related to implementation of the treatment modality decision were unanticipated events, relationship changes, recreational travel changes, and the caregiver role. Nursing interventions are required to realign treatment expectations. Relevance: Significant others have an important role in supporting the patient making the dialysis decision and are often instrumental in implementing the decision.

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.