What role does ethical theory play in everyday deliberation? On the ideal view, agents are taken to have an overriding commitment to a theory that dictates the obligatory, permissible, and forbidden actions in every conceivable situation. I argue that the ideal view imposes undesirable psychological burdens, whereas a non-ideal view—on which agents act according to the norms of their local practices and appeal to theory only when those norms prove insufficient to resolve particular problems—does not. Inspired by J. S. Mill, I develop one non-ideal theory for practices of regret, toleration, punishment, and partiality.

Across three essays, I explore how modern statistical machine learning approaches can be used to glean novel marketing insights from data and to facilitate data-driven decision support in new domains. In particular, I draw on Bayesian nonparametrics, deep generative modeling, and modern Bayesian computational techniques to develop new methodologies that enhance standard marketing models, address modern challenges in data-driven marketing, and, as I show through applications to real world data, glean new, managerially relevant insights. Substantively, my work addresses issues in customer base analysis, the estimation of consumer preferences, and brand identity and logo design. In my first essay, I address how multi-product firms can understand and predict customer purchasing dynamics in the presence of partial information, by developing a Bayesian nonparametric model for customer purchasing activity. This framework yields an interpretable, model-based dashboard, which can be used to predict future activity, and guide managerial decision making. In my second essay, I explore the flexible modeling of customer brand choice dynamics using a novel form of heterogeneity, which I term dynamic heterogeneity. Specifically, I develop a novel doubly hierarchical Gaussian process framework to flexibly model how the preferences of individual customers evolve relative to one another over time, and illustrate the utility of the framework with an application to purchasing during the Great Recession. Finally, in my third essay, I explore how data and models can inform firms' aesthetic choices, in particular the design of their logos. To that end, I develop image processing algorithms and a deep generative model of brand identity that links visual data with textual descriptions of firms and brand personality perceptions, which can be used for understanding design standards, ideation, and ultimately, data-driven design.

No description available.

杜屏. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2005. / 參考文獻 (p. 165-189). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest dissertations and theses, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in English. / Du Ping. / Lun wen (Zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2005. / Can kao wen xian (p. 165-189).

Decision making is the essence of an administrator's job. While planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting are the basic traditional "functions" of management, each of these clearly involves decisions---decisions as to which plan to implement, what goals to pursue, and how best to achieve the desirable ends. / Empirical findings support the hypothesized relationship between perceived external environments by individual school administrators and the types of decision-making models they adopted in schools. In particular, the level of perceived constraint from the external environments' 'linguistic orientation' and 'resource policy' greatly influences the types of decision-making models chosen by individual administrators in schools. Furthermore, the pattern of adopting decision models in a perceived less-constrained environment (i.e., demography and resource policy) correlates with the pattern in a perceived highly constrained environment (i.e., social values, funding, and linguistic orientation), except for the environment of 'control'. This suggests that the decision-making experience gained from a less-constrained environment can serve as a reference frame for the highly constrained environment. Supplementary interview data support the validity of the self-reported decision-making questionnaire. / Given the fact that little is known about how issues arising from external constraint affect the administrative decision-making process, this study focuses specifically on their intricate relationships to broaden our understanding on the ever-expanding arena of administrative decision making in a turbulently growing working environment. / In the past, schools were instrumental in maintaining the existing social order, and as such, they were kept in status quo. However, the globalized reform movement has vastly reshaped schools' external environment, compelling the whole education system to undergo radical change as well. In this context, school administrators have to be more proactive to the changing environment to ensure the viability of their schools. / This research investigates the relationship between the perceived external environment by individual school administrators and the decision-making models they adopted in schools. This study adopts the construct of Lam (1985) which delineates the perceived external environment into four domains: political, economic, social, and cultural domains. Factor analysis on local data yielded six external variables, namely, demography, funding, linguistic orientation, social values, control, and resource policy, and these were perceived to exert varying degrees of constraint in the operation of schools. Issues arising from these external variables were identified. The conceptual rationale and procedures of resolving the issues constitute the basis of pinpointing the decision-making models that school administrators adopt. / Law Chan Fai. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Nicholas Sun Keung Pang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4053. / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-217). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Chiu, Man Kin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- The Model --- p.28 / Chapter 3.1 --- The Preliminaries --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2 --- The problem setting --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3 --- The optimal selling strategy and structural properties --- p.39 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- The optimal selling strategy --- p.39 / Chapter 3.4 --- The optimal investment decision-Making regarding capacity and investment time --- p.44 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- The optimal decision on the construction capacity --- p.45 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- The optimal decision on the starting time of the investment --- p.48 / Chapter 4 --- Numerical analysis --- p.55 / Chapter 4.1 --- The setting of the numerical example --- p.56 / Chapter 4.2 --- The numerical results --- p.63 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- The optimal capacity --- p.63 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- The optimal starting time of the construction --- p.69 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- The effect of the capacity constraint --- p.73 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- The effect of the time constraint --- p.78 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.80 / Bibliography --- p.83

Context is an important driver in decision-making processes and problem-solving. It provides opportunities and constraints that must be considered when decisions are made. However, context is also difficult to define due to limits to knowledge and understanding of previous, current and future conditions. Context is dynamic, emergent, subjective and specific to individuals or groups at a particular place and time. However, context is often relegated to static representations of environmental properties with little consideration for the relationships between an actor (or actors), their task and the environments in which they are situated. This research introduces a new perspective for context in spatial decision-making in Geographical Information Science (GIScience). In addition, this research contributes to GIScience by 1) introducing a theoretical definition of context, 2) the development of methods to bound context into relevant and non-relevent categories, 3) introducing graph-based context models to capture and store relevant context, and 4) demonstrating how context models can be used in spatial decision-support systems.

No description available.

One explanation for the increased use of interactive groups in organisations is that benefits are obtained from pooling individuals?? differing knowledge and abilities. However, prior experimental research has established that groups often do not discuss and use information effectively, exhibiting a bias toward information that is commonly known by all group members, rather than information that is unique to individual group members (common information bias). This dissertation investigated whether the provision of quantitative information resulted in improved group performance in two respects. First, it investigated whether quantitative information was discussed and used more than qualitative information. Second, it examined whether the quantification of information reduced the common information bias. This is important because a basic purpose of managerial accounting is to provide information that improves employees?? abilities to make optimal decisions. This dissertation utilised an experimental task known as a ??hidden profile?? to achieve the research objectives. In a hidden profile experiment, each group member receives some information that is common to everyone in the group, and some information that is unique to them. The group must discuss and use members?? unique information in order to uncover the optimal task solution. This dissertation examined the effect of information availability (common or unique) and information type (quantitative or qualitative) on information discussion and use. There were two stages to the experiment. First, individual group members had to make a capital investment decision, and write down their reasons for that decision. Second, groups had to discuss the information, come to a group decision, and write down their reasons for that decision. The results confirmed a common information bias at the group decision level, with groups significantly favouring common information over unique information, for all measures of discussion and information use. In contrast, while a preference for quantitative information was found at the individual decision level, at a group decision level there were no significant differences in the discussion or use of quantitative and qualitative information, with only one exception: significantly more statements were made about quantitative information.

The French and Dutch refusal to ratify the European Constitution in 2005 and the collapse of many East German businesses post-reunification; are just some examples of the hurdles integrating nations face. Integration of nations affects many economic factors such as public good allocation, trade, production, labour, consumption and even macro-economic policy instruments. Therefore, it is important to understand what motivates integration. Few scholars have broached the subject of the integration of nations (see Goyal and Staal (2004)), where size asymmetry and historical dependence are considered. Starting with Alesina and Spolaore (2003)'s Size of Nations symmetric framework, we attempt to do this with a two nation (asymmetric in size) location model. The key findings are that size differentials and the constitutional design (the identity of the decision maker) matters. In this thesis, we consider the social planner (government) and voters. The social planner maximizes social welfare for his own nation. Voting outcomes become non-trivial as it depends on the number of alternatives and the voting system. We categorize integration into two main forms. Full Integration is when the two nations fully integrate to form a new one, only one capital remains. Federated Integration is where the nations integrate but retain some form of sovereignty; this is represented by the retention of both capitals. Size difference matters when two nations chose to integrate. As the size difference between the two nations increase it becomes harder for integration to occur; nations would integrate if there is no size difference. The identity of the decision maker will affect the threshold on size.