Evaluations of Tactics for Automated Negotiations

[[abstract]]Automated negotiation under the infrastructure of e-commerce is becoming an important issue. However, although the communication protocols and frameworks of automated negotiation have been extensively investigated, the corresponding tactics and strategies are still underdeveloped and need to be evaluated further. Based on the negotiation model proposed by Faratin et al., this paper examines the performance of automated negotiation tactics and intends to provide concise suggestions for the users of automated negotiation. First, theoretical analysis is used to evaluate the behavior-dependent tactics. Constructive conclusions are obtained when single-issue negotiations are considered. Next, a new framework for applying single-issue tactics to multi-issue negotiation is proposed. Based on this framework, theoretical analysis is then extended to multi-issue cases. Finally, different from the previous work, exhaustive simulations based on two-issue negotiations are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of behavior-dependent and time-dependent tactics. The experimental results provide several important insights into negotiation tactics.[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子

Capturing judgement strategies in risk assessments with improved quality of clinical information: How nurses' strategies differ from the ecological model

Background: Nurses' risk assessments of patients at risk of deterioration are sometimes suboptimal. Advances in clinical simulation mean higher quality information can be used as an alternative to traditional paper-based approaches as a means of improving judgement. This paper tests the hypothesis that nurses' judgement strategies and policies change as the quality of information used by nurses in simulation changes. Methods: Sixty-three student nurses and 34 experienced viewed 25 paper-case based and 25 clinically simulated scenarios, derived from real cases, and judged whether the (simulated) patient was at 'risk' of acute deterioration. Criteria of judgement "correctness" came from the same real cases. Information relative weights were calculated to examine judgement policies of individual nurses. Group comparisons of nurses and students under both paper and clinical simulation conditions were undertaken using non parametric statistical tests. Judgment policies were also compared to the ecological statistical model. Cumulative relative weights were calculated to assess how much information nurses used when making judgements. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were generated to examine predictive accuracy amongst the nurses. Results: There were significant variations between nurses' judgement policies and those optimal policies determined by the ecological model. Nurses significantly underused the cues of consciousness level, respiration rate, and systolic blood pressure than the ecological model requires. However, in clinical simulations, they tended to make appropriate use of heart rate, with non-significant difference in the relative weights of heart rate between clinical simulations and the ecological model. Experienced nurses paid substantially more attention to respiration rate in the simulated setting compared to paper cases, while students maintained a similar attentive level to this cue. This led to a non-significant difference in relative weights of respiration rate between experienced nurses and students. Conclusions: Improving the quality of information by clinical simulations significantly impacted on nurses' judgement policies of risk assessments. Nurses' judgement strategies also varied with the increased years of experience. Such variations in processing clinical information may contribute to nurses' suboptimal judgements in clinical practice. Constructing predictive models of common judgement situations, and increasing nurses' awareness of information weightings in such models may help improve judgements made by nurses

The effect of clinical experience, judgment task difficulty and time pressure on nurses’ confidence calibration in a high fidelity clinical simulation

Background: Misplaced or poorly calibrated confidence in healthcare professionals’ judgments compromises the quality of health care. Using higher fidelity clinical simulations to elicit clinicians’ confidence 'calibration' (i.e. overconfidence or underconfidence) in more realistic settings is a promising but underutilized tactic. In this study we examine nurses’ calibration of confidence with judgment accuracy for critical event risk assessment judgments in a high fidelity simulated clinical environment. The study also explores the effects of clinical experience, task difficulty and time pressure on the relationship between confidence and accuracy. Methods: 63 student and 34 experienced nurses made dichotomous risk assessments on 25 scenarios simulated in a high fidelity clinical environment. Each nurse also assigned a score (0–100) reflecting the level of confidence in their judgments. Scenarios were derived from real patient cases and classified as easy or difficult judgment tasks. Nurses made half of their judgments under time pressure. Confidence calibration statistics were calculated and calibration curves generated. Results: Nurse students were underconfident (mean over/underconfidence score −1.05) and experienced nurses overconfident (mean over/underconfidence score 6.56), P = 0.01. No significant differences in calibration and resolution were found between the two groups (P = 0.80 and P = 0.51, respectively). There was a significant interaction between time pressure and task difficulty on confidence (P = 0.008); time pressure increased confidence in easy cases but reduced confidence in difficult cases. Time pressure had no effect on confidence or accuracy. Judgment task difficulty impacted significantly on nurses’ judgmental accuracy and confidence. A 'hard-easy' effect was observed: nurses were overconfident in difficult judgments and underconfident in easy judgments. Conclusion: Nurses were poorly calibrated when making risk assessment judgments in a high fidelity simulated setting. Nurses with more experience tended toward overconfidence. Whilst time pressure had little effect on calibration, nurses’ over/underconfidence varied significantly with the degree of task difficulty. More research is required to identify strategies to minimize such cognitive biases

Referral Decision Making of General Practitioners:A Signal Detection Study

Background. Signal detection theory (SDT) describes how respondents categorize ambiguous stimuli over repeated trials. It measures separately ‘‘discrimination’’ (ability to recognize a signal amid noise) and ‘‘criterion’’ (inclination to respond ‘‘signal’’ v. ‘‘noise’’). This is important because respondents may produce the same accuracy rate for different reasons. We employed SDT to measure the referral decision making of general practitioners (GPs) in cases of possi- ble lung cancer. Methods. We constructed 44 vignettes of patients for whom lung cancer could be considered and esti- mated their 1-year risk. Under UK risk-based guidelines, half of the vignettes required urgent referral. We recruited 216 GPs from practices across England. Practices differed in the positive predictive value (PPV) of their urgent refer- rals (chance of referrals identifying cancer) and the sensitivity (chance of cancer patients being picked up via urgent referral from their practice). Participants saw the vignettes online and indicated whether they would refer each patient urgently or not. We calculated each GP’s discrimination (d0) and criterion (c) and regressed these on practice PPV and sensitivity, as well as on GP experience and gender. Results. Criterion was associated with practice PPV: as PPV increased, GPs’c also increased, indicating lower inclination to refer (b = 0.06 [0.02–0.09]; P = 0.001). Female GPs were more inclined to refer than male GPs (b = 20.20 [20.40 to 20.001]; P = 0.049). Average discrimination was modest (d 0 = 0.77), highly variable (range, 20.28 to 1.91), and not associated with practice referral performance. Conclusions. High referral PPV at the organizational level indicates GPs’ inclination to avoid false positives, not bet- ter discrimination. Rather than bluntly mandating increases in practice PPV via more referrals, it is necessary to increase discrimination by improving the evidence base for cancer referral decisions

Designing a participatory process for stakeholder involvement in a societal decision

For many societal decisions, governments and public bodies are beginning to involve stakeholders and the general public to a far greater extent than previously in the decision process. Stakeholder workshops, citizen juries, focus groups, electronic forums, web-polling and many other means of consultation are being used to draw citizens into the process of deciding between different options on the management of their communities. Politicians are drawn to such instruments because greater public involvement seems to achieve greater acceptance of the ultimate decision and, arguably in more objective terms, a better decision. Many academic studies have investigated participation and wider aspects of deliberative democracy and found that the politicians’ intuition is borne out in practice. However, while there have been many studies focused on specific instruments of participation, few have compared different ones. Moreover, there seems to be a dearth of advice on how to assemble a set of different instruments into a complete participatory decision making process. This paper offers a decision modelling framework which, firstly, provides a methodology which may be used to design participatory processes and, secondly, raises a number of questions which future comparative studies will need to address