Election turnout statistics in many countries: similarities, differences, and a diffusive field model for decision-making.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Borghesi C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3354000 | biostudies-literature | 2012
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:A fundamental component of interacting with our environment is gathering and interpretation of sensory information. When investigating how perceptual information influences decision-making, most researchers have relied on manipulated or unnatural information as perceptual input, resulting in findings that may not generalize to real-world scenes. Unlike simplified, artificial stimuli, real-world scenes contain low-level regularities that are informative about the structural complexity, which the brain could exploit. In this study, participants performed an animal detection task on low, medium or high complexity scenes as determined by two biologically plausible natural scene statistics, contrast energy (CE) or spatial coherence (SC). In experiment 1, stimuli were sampled such that CE and SC both influenced scene complexity. Diffusion modelling showed that the speed of information processing was affected by low-level scene complexity. Experiment 2a/b refined these observations by showing how isolated manipulation of SC resulted in weaker but comparable effects, with an additional change in response boundary, whereas manipulation of only CE had no effect. Overall, performance was best for scenes with intermediate complexity. Our systematic definition quantifies how natural scene complexity interacts with decision-making. We speculate that CE and SC serve as an indication to adjust perceptual decision-making based on the complexity of the input.
| S-EPMC7324621 | biostudies-literature
Project description:During pre-election campaigns, parties make great efforts to persuade constituents to vote for them. Usually, new parties have smaller budgets and fewer resources than veteran parties. In particular, the more heterogeneous the party's electorate, the more critical the issue of resource allocation is. This paper presents a method to allocate new party's campaign advertising resources efficiently to maximize its voters. The model developed uses Pareto principle and multi-criteria approach and integrates party's confidential data together with an official open-to-all data. The model produced clear and unbiased results, and these advantages made it effective and user-friendly for the strategic team and campaign managers. We implemented the model on a specific new party during the intensive political period before the April 2019 elections in Israel.•This paper analyses the issue of allocating new party's campaign advertising resources efficiently to maximize its voters.•Our model integrates Pareto principle with multi-criteria decision-making approach and uses the party's confidential data together with official open to all state data.•The model produced clear and unbiased results, and these advantages made it effective and user-friendly for the strategic team and campaign managers.
| S-EPMC8374358 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Introduction: Our objective was to analyze and compare systematically and structurally reimbursement systems in Poland and other countries. Methods: The systems were selected based on recommendations issued by the Polish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariffication (AHTAPol), which explicitly referred to other countries and agencies). Consequently, apart from Poland, the countries included in the analysis were England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Relevant information and data were collected through a systematic search of PubMed (Medline), Embase and The Cochrane Library as well as competent authority websites and grey literature sources. Results and discussion: In most of the countries, the submission of a reimbursement application is initiated by a pharmaceutical company, and only a few countries allow it before a product is approved for marketing. All of the agencies analyzed are independent and some have regulatory function of reimbursement decision making body. A key criterion differentiating the various agencies in terms of HTA is the cost-effectiveness threshold. Most of the countries have specific mechanisms to improve access to expensive specialty drugs, including cancer drugs and those used for rare diseases. Reimbursement systems often lack consistency in appreciating the same stages, leading to heterogeneous decision-making processes. The analysis of recommendations issued in different countries for the same medicinal product will allow a better understanding of the relations between the reimbursement system, HTA assessment, stakeholders involvement and decision on reimbursement of innovative drugs.
| S-EPMC10611478 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Partnerships in marine monitoring combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge and western science are developing globally to improve our understanding of temporal changes in ecological communities that better inform coastal management practices. A fuller communication between scientists and Indigenous partners about the limitations of monitoring results to identify change is essential to the impact of monitoring datasets on decision-making. Here we present a 5-year co-developed case study from a fish monitoring partnership in northwest Australia showing how uncertainty estimated by Bayesian models can be incorporated into monitoring management indicators. Our simulation approach revealed there was high uncertainty in detecting immediate change over the following monitoring year when translated to health performance indicators. Incorporating credibility estimates into health assessments added substantial information to monitoring trends, provided a deeper understanding of monitoring limitations and highlighted the importance of carefully selecting the way we evaluate management performance indicators.
| S-EPMC10992390 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A dynamic decision-making system that includes a mass of indistinguishable agents could manifest impressive heterogeneity. This kind of non-homogeneity is postulated to result from macroscopic behavioral tactics employed by almost all involved agents. A State-Space Based (SSB) mass event-history model is developed here to explore the potential existence of such macroscopic behaviors. By imposing an unobserved internal state-space variable into the system, each individual's event-history is made into a composition of a common state duration and an individual specific time to action. With the common state modeling of the macroscopic behavior, parametric statistical inferences are derived under the current-status data structure and conditional independence assumptions. Identifiability and computation related problems are also addressed. From the dynamic perspectives of system-wise heterogeneity, this SSB mass event-history model is shown to be very distinct from a random effect model via the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) in a numerical experiment. Real data showing the mass invasion by two species of parasitic nematode into two species of host larvae are also analyzed. The analysis results not only are found coherent in the context of the biology of the nematode as a parasite, but also include new quantitative interpretations.
| S-EPMC2676853 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Portfolio performance evaluation is a major data envelopment analysis (DEA) application in the finance field. Most proposed DEA approaches focus on single-period portfolio performance assessment based on aggregated historical data. However, such an evaluation setting may result in the loss of valuable information in past individual time periods, and violate real-world portfolio managers' and investors' decision making, which generally involves multiple time periods. Furthermore, to our knowledge, all proposed DEA approaches treat the financial assets comprising a portfolio as a "black box": thus there is no information about their individual performance. Moreover, ideal portfolio evaluation models should enable the target portfolio to compare with all possible portfolios, i.e., enabling full diversification of portfolios across all financial assets. Hence, this research aims at developing nested dynamic network DEA models, an additive model being nested within a slacks-based measure (SBM) DEA model, that explicitly utilizes the information in each individual time period to fully and simultaneously measure the multi-period efficiency of a portfolio and its comprised financial assets. The proposed nested dynamic network DEA models, referred to as NDN DEA models, are linear programs with conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) constraints, and infinitely many decision making units (DMUs). In conducting the empirical study, this research applies the NDN DEA models to a real-world case study, in which Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian algorithms are used to obtain future performance forecasts in today's highly volatile investment environments.
| S-EPMC7534632 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionDrugs for rare diseases (DRDs) offer important health benefits, but challenge traditional health technology assessment, reimbursement, and pricing processes due to limited effectiveness evidence. Recently, modified processes to address these challenges while improving patient access have been proposed in Canada. This review examined processes in 12 jurisdictions to develop recommendations for consideration during formal government-led multi-sectoral discussions currently taking place in Canada.Methods(i) A scoping review of DRD reimbursement processes, (ii) key informant interviews, (iii) a case study of evaluations for and the reimbursement status of a set of 7 DRDs, and (iv) a virtual, multi-stakeholder consultation retreat were conducted.ResultsOnly NHS England has a process specifically for DRDs, while Italy, Scotland, and Australia have modified processes for eligible DRDs. Almost all consider economic evaluations, budget impact analyses, and patient-reported outcomes; but less than half accept surrogate measures. Disease severity, lack of alternatives, therapeutic value, quality of evidence, and value for money are factors used in all decision-making process; only NICE England uses a cost-effectiveness threshold. Budget impact is considered in all jurisdictions except Sweden. In Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, specific factors are considered for DRDs. However, in all jurisdictions opportunities for clinician/patient input are the same as those for other drugs. Of the 7 DRDs included in the case study, the number that received a positive reimbursement recommendation was highest in Germany and France, followed by Spain and Italy. No relationship between recommendation type and specific elements of the pricing and reimbursement process was found.ConclusionsBased on the collective findings from all components of the project, seven recommendations for possible action in Canada are proposed. These focus on defining "appropriate access", determining when a "full" HTA may not be needed, improving coordination among stakeholder groups, developing a Canadian framework for Managed Access Plans, creating a pan-Canadian DRD/rare disease data infrastructure, genuine and continued engagement of patient groups and clinicians, and further research on different decision and financing options, including MAPs.
| S-EPMC9264608 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Perceptual decision making requires a complex set of computations to implement, evaluate, and adjust the conversion of sensory input into a categorical judgment. Little is known about how the specific underlying computations are distributed across and within different brain regions. Using a reaction-time (RT) motion direction-discrimination task, we show that a unique combination of decision-related signals is represented in monkey frontal eye field (FEF). Some responses were modulated by choice, motion strength, and RT, consistent with a temporal accumulation of sensory evidence. These responses converged to a threshold level prior to behavioral responses, reflecting decision commitment. Other responses continued to be modulated by motion strength even after decision commitment, possibly providing a memory trace to help evaluate and adjust the decision process with respect to rewarding outcomes. Both response types were encoded by FEF neurons with both narrow- and broad-spike waveforms, presumably corresponding to inhibitory interneurons and excitatory pyramidal neurons, respectively, and with diverse visual, visuomotor, and motor properties, albeit with different frequencies. Thus, neurons throughout FEF appear to make multiple contributions to decision making that only partially overlap with contributions from other brain regions. These results help to constrain how networks of brain regions interact to generate perceptual decisions.
| S-EPMC3328342 | biostudies-literature
Project description:According to a prominent view of sensorimotor processing in primates, selection and specification of possible actions are not sequential operations. Rather, a decision for an action emerges from competition between different movement plans, which are specified and selected in parallel. For action choices which are based on ambiguous sensory input, the frontoparietal sensorimotor areas are considered part of the common underlying neural substrate for selection and specification of action. These areas have been shown capable of encoding alternative spatial motor goals in parallel during movement planning, and show signatures of competitive value-based selection among these goals. Since the same network is also involved in learning sensorimotor associations, competitive action selection (decision making) should not only be driven by the sensory evidence and expected reward in favor of either action, but also by the subject's learning history of different sensorimotor associations. Previous computational models of competitive neural decision making used predefined associations between sensory input and corresponding motor output. Such hard-wiring does not allow modeling of how decisions are influenced by sensorimotor learning or by changing reward contingencies. We present a dynamic neural field model which learns arbitrary sensorimotor associations with a reward-driven Hebbian learning algorithm. We show that the model accurately simulates the dynamics of action selection with different reward contingencies, as observed in monkey cortical recordings, and that it correctly predicted the pattern of choice errors in a control experiment. With our adaptive model we demonstrate how network plasticity, which is required for association learning and adaptation to new reward contingencies, can influence choice behavior. The field model provides an integrated and dynamic account for the operations of sensorimotor integration, working memory and action selection required for decision making in ambiguous choice situations.
| S-EPMC3499253 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In recent years, studies have increasingly dealt with the interaction of gaze behavior and decision making of team sports athletes. However, there is still a variety of important game situations, for example, in the case of penalty corners in field hockey, in which this interaction has not been investigated in detail yet. Penalty corners present a meaningful goal scoring opportunity by providing a relatively free shot. This paper considers two studies. The first study investigated a possible connection between the gaze behavior and the quality of decisions of experienced field hockey players and evaluated the level of success of different gaze strategies. A preliminary study (Study 1) was designed as a survey questionnaire with the aim of preparing for the main study by obtaining subjective assessments of the individual gaze behavior and decision making of professional athletes. In the second and the main study (Study 2), the gaze behavior of experienced field hockey players was recorded using mobile eye-tracking systems to analyze different strategical approaches in associated gaze behavior and decision making. Study 1 showed that players consider reacting to the defenders' behavior during a penalty corner a promising avenue for improving success at penalty corner attempts. It also indicated that such defense-dependent strategies are currently only rarely employed. Study 2 demonstrated how gaze behavior differs between different strategical approaches of the offense. It was shown that the gaze direction on the ball, the stopper, and the goal area is important to allow for a more optimal adaptation to the tactical behavior of defense. It can be concluded that adaptive decision making (i.e., choosing which variation will be carried out just after the "injection" of the ball) seems promising but requires further training to improve the success rate of penalty corner.
| S-EPMC8366230 | biostudies-literature