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People make numerous health-related choices each day: For example, deciding to brush one's teeth or to eat well and healthy - or not to do these activities. To support complex decisions and subsequent behaviour change, both Behaviour Change Interventions (BCIs) and Patient Decision Aids (PtDAs) have been developed and evolved independently to support people in health-related decision making. In this paper, we critically review BCIs and PtDAs, examine their similarities and differences, and identify potential for integration of expertise to increase the benefits for people engaging with healthcare and health behaviours. The two approaches appear to mainly differ in terms of their (1) goals and foci, (2) theoretical basis, (3) development frameworks, (4) active ingredients and (5) effect evaluation. To facilitate the integration of scientific insights from these two fields, we recommend to (1) bring both fields together and promote interprofessional discussions, (2) train (health) professionals to recognise strengths of both approaches, (3) investigate the synergy of the two fields, (4) be prepared for and try to mitigate a culture shock when the fields start to interact. Knowledge generated by researching PtDAs could be used to facilitate decisional processes that enable patients to choose goals that are in line with their values and preferences, while insights from researching BCIs could be used to facilitate engagement with, and implementation of those goals. This integration could allow researchers and intervention providers to increase the benefits for people engaging with healthcare and health behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) or Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods have received much attention from researchers and practitioners in evaluating, assessing and ranking alternatives across diverse industries. Among numerous MCDA/MCDM methods developed to solve real-world decision problems, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) continues to work satisfactorily across different application areas. In this paper, we conduct a state-of-the-art literature survey to taxonomize the research on TOPSIS applications and methodologies. The classification scheme for this review contains 266 scholarly papers from 103 journals since the year 2000, separated into nine application areas: (1) Supply Chain Management and Logistics, (2) Design, Engineering and Manufacturing Systems, (3) Business and Marketing Management, (4) Health, Safety and Environment Management, (5) Human Resources Management, (6) Energy Management, (7) Chemical Engineering, (8) Water Resources Management and (9) Other topics. Scholarly papers in the TOPSIS discipline are further interpreted based on (1) publication year, (2) publication journal, (3) authors’ nationality and (4) other methods combined or compared with TOPSIS. We end our review paper with recommendations for future research in TOPSIS decision-making that is both forward-looking and practically oriented. This paper provides useful insights into the TOPSIS method and suggests a framework for future attempts in this area for academic researchers and practitioners. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present a new approach for determining weights of experts in the group decision making problems. Group decision making has become a very active research field over the last decade. Especially, the investigation to determine weights of experts for group decision making has attracted great interests from researchers recently and some approaches have been developed. In this paper, the weights of experts are determined in the group decision environment via projection method. First of all, the average decision of all individual decisions is defined as the ideal decision. After that, the weight of expert is determined by the projection of individual decision on the ideal decision. By using the weights of experts, all individual decisions are aggregate into a collective decision. Then an ideal solution of alternatives of the collective decision, expressed by a vector, is determined. Further, the preference order of alternatives are ranked in accordance with the projections of alternatives on the ideal solution. Comparisons with an extended TOPSIS method are also made. Finally, an example is provided to illustrate the developed approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is a comparative analysis of the telecommunications policy-making process in China and India. Adopting an institutionalist perspective and multi-streams framework, the paper analyzes the formal structures, rule-making procedures and interest groups involved in telecommunications policy-making in the two countries, in terms of their evolution over the last two decades. Though the two systems began this period with a somewhat similar ministerial-bureaucratic decision-making model, and faced similar problems of assimilating new interest groups and responding to international pressures, the paper finds that the decision systems in the two countries evolved in significantly different directions. China''s telecommunications decision-making is significantly affected by the macro level political rearrangement and is more likely to be non-incremental. On the other hand, confronted by an increasingly litigious environment and a more fractious interest group culture, India represents a somewhat classical textbook case of incremental policy making. Nevertheless, numerous challenges remain in both countries, including institutional capacity and excessive regulatory deference to political authority. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper establishes the computational complexity status for a problem of deciding on the quality of a committee. Starting with individual preferences over alternatives, we analyse when it can be determined efficiently if a given committee satisfies a weak (resp. strong) Condorcet criterion–i.e., if is at least as good as (resp. better than) every other committee in a pairwise majority comparison. Scoring functions used in classic voting rules are adapted for these comparisons. In particular, we draw the sharp separation line between computationally tractable and intractable instances with respect to different voting rules. Finally, we show that deciding if there exists a committee which satisfies the weak (resp. strong) Condorcet criterion is computationally hard. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a new interpretation of intuitionistic fuzzy sets in the framework of the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence (DST). This interpretation makes it possible to represent all mathematical operations on intuitionistic fuzzy values as the operations on belief intervals. Such approach allows us to use directly the Dempster’s rule of combination to aggregate local criteria presented by intuitionistic fuzzy values in the decision making problem. The usefulness of the developed method is illustrated with the known example of multiple criteria decision making problem. The proposed approach and a new method for interval comparison based on DST, allow us to solve multiple criteria decision making problem without intermediate defuzzification when not only criteria, but their weights are intuitionistic fuzzy values. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]