Download or read book Imperfect Alternatives written by Neil K. Komesar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major approaches to law and public policy, ranging from law and economics to the fundamental rights approach to constitutional law, are based on the belief that the identification of the correct social goals or values is the key to describing or prescribing law and public policy outcomes. In this book, Neil Komesar argues that this emphasis on goal choice ignores an essential element—institutional choice. Indeed, as important as determining our social goals is deciding which institution is best equipped to implement them—the market, the political process, or the adjucative process. Pointing out that all three institutions are massive, complex, and imperfect, Komesar develops a strategy for comparative institutional analysis that assesses variations in institutional ability. He then powerfully demonstrates the value of this analytical framework by using it to examine important contemporary issues ranging from tort reform to constitution-making.
Download or read book Choosing Schools written by Mark Schneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.
Download or read book Choosing Disinfection Alternatives for Water Wastewater Treatment Plants written by Frank R. Spellman and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1999-06-29 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Safe drinking water and effluent have long been dependent on the large-scale use of chlorine. Process Safety Management (PSM) and the Risk Management Program (RMP), safety regulations now enforced by OSHA and EPA are leading to serious reconsideration of chlorination as the preferred disinfection method. Renewed concern about the safety of chlorination by-products is also driving water and wastewater specialists and plant personnel to consider alternatives to traditional chlorine application. Choosing Disinfection Alternatives for Water/Wastewater Treatment is a practical explanation of all available disinfection technologies in light of management criteria: legal compliance, plant safety, effuent quality, and cost. This text is designed for all who must understand and act on the challenge of finding safe and equally effective methods of wastwater and water disinfection besides traditional chlorination.
Download or read book Choosing an Inferior Alternative written by J. Edward Russo and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We show how decision makers can be induced to choose a personally inferior alternative, a strong violation of rational decision making. The binary choice process is traced to reveal the progress of the manipulation. First, the inferior alternative is installed as the leading option by starting with information that supports it. Then the decision maker uses the natural process of distorting new information to support whichever alternative is leading to overcome the inherent advantages of the superior alternative. The end result is a majority choice of the self-identified inferior alternative. Self-reported awareness reveals no relation between awareness and distortion to support the inferior alternative, suggesting that such manipulated preference violations are unlikely to be detected and self-corrected. In accord with the lack of awareness, final confidence is just as high when the inferior alternative is chosen as when the superior one is. The discussion considers how to prevent an adversary from manipulating one's decisions using this technique.
Download or read book Choosing Safety written by Michael V. Dr Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The technological age has seen a range of catastrophic and preventable failures, often as a result of decisions that did not appropriately consider safety as a factor in design and engineering. Through more than a dozen practical examples from the author‘s experience in nuclear power, aerospace, and other potentially hazardous facilities, Choosing Safety is the first book to bring together probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis using real case studies. For managers, project leaders, engineers, scientists, and interested students, Michael V. Frank focuses on methods for making logical decisions about complex engineered systems and products in which safety is a key factor in design - and where failure can cause great harm, injury, or death.
Download or read book The Paradox of Choice written by Barry Schwartz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.
Download or read book Choosing Well written by Chrisoula Andreou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book focuses on the challenges associated with effective choice over time. In particular, it considers the challenges raised by cyclic preferences and by incomplete preferences, both of which interfere with the agent's neatly ordering her options, and which make the agent susceptible to self-defeating patterns of choice in which the agent is drawn into taking each of a series of steps that collectively lead her to a result that she deems unacceptable. The book's guiding questions are the following: What is an agent to do if she finds herself with cyclic preferences or with incomplete preferences? Is an agent or group of agents with such preferences necessarily irrational? It is argued that the answer to the latter question is "no"; rationality does not invariably prohibit disorderly preferences, but it does (to get back to the first question) prompt us to proceed with caution and with a readiness to show restraint, based on an awareness of larger dynamics, when our preferences are disorderly. Theories of rational choice often dismiss or abstract away from the sorts of disorderly preferences at issue here. They assume that rational agents can and should have neat preferences over their options; but this assumption is problematic. Rationality can validate certain disorderly preference structures while also protecting us from self-defeating patterns of choice. Rationality can thus handle quite a lot of messiness, which is important, since rationality wouldn't be all that helpful if, whenever messiness threatened, we could not turn to it for guidance"--
Download or read book Free Will Libertarianism alternative possibilities and moral responsibility written by John Martin Fischer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Choosing Normative Concepts written by Matti Eklund and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts we use to value and prescribe (concepts like good, right, ought) are historically contingent, and we could have found ourselves with others. But what does it mean to say that some concepts are better than others for purposes of action-guiding and deliberation? What is it to choose between different normative conceptual frameworks?
Download or read book Principles of Econometrics written by R. Carter Hill and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 1808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Principles of Econometrics, Fifth Edition, is an introductory book for undergraduate students in economics and finance, as well as first-year graduate students in a variety of fields that include economics, finance, accounting, marketing, public policy, sociology, law, and political science. Students will gain a working knowledge of basic econometrics so they can apply modeling, estimation, inference, and forecasting techniques when working with real-world economic problems. Readers will also gain an understanding of econometrics that allows them to critically evaluate the results of others’ economic research and modeling, and that will serve as a foundation for further study of the field. This new edition of the highly-regarded econometrics text includes major revisions that both reorganize the content and present students with plentiful opportunities to practice what they have read in the form of chapter-end exercises.
Download or read book Choosing for Changing Selves written by Richard Pettigrew and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the course of our lives, sometimes as a result of decisions we make--such as when we choose to become a parent or move to a new country--and sometimes as a result of forces beyond our control--such as when our political views change as we grow older. This poses a problem for any theory of how we ought to make decisions. Which values and preferences should we appeal to when we are making our decisions? Our current values? Our past ones? Our future ones? Or some amalgamation of all them? But if that, which amalgamation? In Choosing for Changing Selves, Richard Pettigrew presents a theory of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those future times.
Download or read book Making Better Decisions written by Pekka J. Korhonen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive introduction to decision-making in an MCDM framework. Designed as a tutorial, it presents the main concepts and methods to be applied, together with essential background information. This includes the concept of nondominance, Simon’s bounded rationality, Tversky and Kahneman’s prospect theory, and the concepts of behavioral vs. mathematical convergence and premature stopping put forward by Korhonen, Moskowitz and Wallenius. The book concludes with a non-technical review of many popular decision algorithms, including the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), VIMDA, and a number of classic interactive man-machine algorithms. In essence, the book is a “one-stop” source on everything you need to know about managerial decision-making in the multiple-criteria setting.
Download or read book Exit House written by Jo Roman and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1992 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Years ago, terminally ill Jo Roman bravely brought the subject of suicide from the shadows into the clear white light of reason. The subject of the PBS documentary Choosing Suicide, she devoted the last months of her life to writing this moving plea for the right to decide the length of one's life span. Long out of print, Exit House is about living life on one's own terms. 8 pages of photographs.
Download or read book Choosing an Alternative to Halon written by Joan M. Leedy and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 2 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Complexity Theory in Public Administration written by Elizabeth Anne Eppel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reframes theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to public administration by drawing on complexity theory concepts. It aims to provide alternative perspectives on the theory, research and practice of public administration, avoiding assumptions of traditional theory-building. The contributors explain both how ongoing non-linear interactions result in macro patterns becoming established in a complexity-informed world view, and the implications of these dynamics. Complexity theory explains the way in which many repeated non-linear interactions among elements within a whole can result in processes and patterns emerging without design or direction, thus necessitating a reconsideration of the predictability and controllability of many aspects of public administration. As well as illustrating how complexity theory informs new research methods for studying this field, the book also shines a light on the different practices required of public administrators to cope with the complexity encountered in the public policy and public management fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Public Management Review journal.
Download or read book Choosing Buddhism written by Mauro Peressini and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the experience of Canadians who chose to convert to Buddhism and to embrace its teachings and practices in their daily lives. It presents the life stories of eight Canadians who first encountered Buddhism between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and are now ordained or lay Buddhist teachers. In recent census records, over 300,000 Canadians identified their religious affiliation as Buddhist. The great majority are of Asian origin and were born into Buddhist families or were Buddhist at the time of their arrival in Canada. Since the late 1960s, however, the number of Canadians converting to Buddhism has doubled every decade, and this demographic now includes more than 20,000 individuals. The eight Canadians whose life stories are featured in this book are among the very first to have chosen Buddhism. Their first-hand accounts shed light on why and how people convert to a religion from such distant shores. This book also offers contextual material (photos and texts) that complements the eight life stories. This material is meant to help readers enrich their understanding of the life stories by offering them the information they need to better grasp the meaning of the Buddhist notions mentioned, and the broader historical and spiritual contexts of the biographical accounts. While this book will be of interest to specialists because of the first-hand accounts, it is primarily aimed at a wider audience interested in Buddhism, religions or spirituality in general. It will also be of use to teachers whose courses touch upon any of these subjects. By combining life stories and contextual material, and placing an emphasis on the concrete experiences of Canadians with whom readers can identify, this book is an introduction to Buddhism and to what it means to lead a Buddhist life in contemporary Canada.
Download or read book Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation written by Kenneth E. Train and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the new generation of discrete choice methods, focusing on the many advances that are made possible by simulation. Researchers use these statistical methods to examine the choices that consumers, households, firms, and other agents make. Each of the major models is covered: logit, generalized extreme value, or GEV (including nested and cross-nested logits), probit, and mixed logit, plus a variety of specifications that build on these basics. Recent advances in Bayesian procedures are explored, including the use of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and its variant Gibbs sampling. This second edition adds chapters on endogeneity and expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms. No other book incorporates all these fields, which have arisen in the past 25 years. The procedures are applicable in many fields, including energy, transportation, environmental studies, health, labor, and marketing.
