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Supplemental material, EULT_manuals_070220 for Evaluation of the enhanced upper limb therapy programme within the Robot-Assisted Training for the Upper Limb after Stroke trial: descriptive analysis of intervention fidelity, goal selection and goal achievement by Helen Bosomworth, Helen Rodgers, Lisa Shaw, Leanne Smith, Lydia Aird, Denise Howel, Nina Wilson, Natasha Alvarado, Sreeman Andole, David L Cohen, Jesse Dawson, Cristina Fernandez-Garcia, Tracy Finch, Gary A Ford, Richard Francis, Steven Hogg, Niall Hughes, Christopher I Price, Laura Ternent, Duncan L Turner, Luke Vale, Scott Wilkes, Hermano I Krebs and Frederike van Wijck in Clinical Rehabilitation

SPIRIT Checklist for RATULS protocol paper. (DOC 120 kb)

Background Loss of arm function is a common and distressing consequence of stroke. We describe the protocol for a pragmatic, multicentre randomised controlled trial to determine whether robot-assisted training improves upper limb function following stroke. Methods/design Study design: a pragmatic, three-arm, multicentre randomised controlled trial, economic analysis and process evaluation. Setting: NHS stroke services. Participants: adults with acute or chronic first-ever stroke (1 week to 5 years post stroke) causing moderate to severe upper limb functional limitation. Randomisation groups: 1. Robot-assisted training using the InMotion robotic gym system for 45 min, three times/week for 12 weeks 2. Enhanced upper limb therapy for 45 min, three times/week for 12 weeks 3. Usual NHS care in accordance with local clinical practice Randomisation: individual participant randomisation stratified by centre, time since stroke, and severity of upper limb impairment. Primary outcome: upper limb function measured by the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) at 3 months post randomisation. Secondary outcomes: upper limb impairment (Fugl-Meyer Test), activities of daily living (Barthel ADL Index), quality of life (Stroke Impact Scale, EQ-5D-5L), resource use, cost per quality-adjusted life year and adverse events, at 3 and 6 months. Blinding: outcomes are undertaken by blinded assessors. Economic analysis: micro-costing and economic evaluation of interventions compared to usual NHS care. A within-trial analysis, with an economic model will be used to extrapolate longer-term costs and outcomes. Process evaluation: semi-structured interviews with participants and professionals to seek their views and experiences of the rehabilitation that they have received or provided, and factors affecting the implementation of the trial. Sample size: allowing for 10% attrition, 720 participants provide 80% power to detect a 15% difference in successful outcome between each of the treatment pairs. Successful outcome definition: baseline ARAT 0–7 must improve by 3 or more points; baseline ARAT 8–13 improve by 4 or more points; baseline ARAT 14–19 improve by 5 or more points; baseline ARAT 20–39 improve by 6 or more points. Discussion The results from this trial will determine whether robot-assisted training improves upper limb function post stroke. Trial registration ISRCTN, identifier: ISRCTN69371850. Registered 4 October 2013. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13063-017-2083-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decisionmaking. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect\ud behavior differently, and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out - transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts\ud

Models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred to a more moderate policy by the median voter in a majority of districts. The mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. Furthermore, I show that while standard single district elections always have misaligned voting i.e. some voters do not vote for their preferred choice, equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district. Finally, I show that when parties are impatient, a fixed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments, while uncertainty will favour single party governments.

Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority of districts, while the mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. Furthermore, I show that while standard single district elections always have misaligned voting i.e. some voters do not vote for their preferred choice, equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district. Finally, I show that when parties are impatient, a fixed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments, while uncertainty will favour single party governments.

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decisionmaking. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently, and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out - transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.

We show theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision making and deliberation. We present a model in which committee members have career concerns and unanimity is needed to change the status quo. We study three scenarios - secrecy, where votes and communication are secret, mild transparency, where individual votes are public, and full transparency, where both communication and individual votes are public. The two transparency regimes affect deliberation in different ways but lead both to a breakdown of information aggregation. However, transparency lowers the probability of an error if maintaining the status quo is the correct choice. As a consequence, the principal is better off in expectation under transparency than under secrecy if the cost of wrongly changing the status quo is high enough. We test the model's key predictions in a laboratory experiment varying the level of transparency between treatments. We observe strong effects of transparency on committee error rates that are largely consistent with the model. On the individual level, we observe strong effects on deliberative behavior which go in the predicted direction but are less pronounced than in theory.

Defence date: 22 November 2013 This thesis is a collection of three essays on voting as a means of collective decision- making. The first chapter builds a model of how voters should optimally behave in a legislative election with three parties under plurality rule. I show that, in contrast to single district elections, properties such as polarisation and misaligned voting can be mitigated in legislative elections. The second chapter studies a model of committee decision making where members have career concerns and a principal can choose the level of transparency (how much of the committees decision he can observe). We show that increased transparency leads to a breakdown in information aggregation, but that this may actually increase the principal’s payoff. The theoretical model is then tested in a laboratory experiment. The final chapter introduces a model of legislative bargaining where three parties in the legislature bargain over the formation of government by choosing a policy and a distribution of government perks. I show that when individual politicians are responsible for the policies they implement - that is, those outside of government are not held accountable by voters for the implemented governments policies, while each individual politician in the ruling coalition is - then a given seat distribution can result in almost any two party coalition. -- Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule -- How transparency kills information aggregation (and why that may be good) -- Legislative bargaining with accountability