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Despite rhetoric supporting the advancement of women on corporate boards, meager evidence supports significant progress over the past decade in the United States. The authors examine archival board data (for more than 3,000 U.S. publicly traded firms) from 2002 to 2011 and find that a female is most likely to be appointed to a corporate board when a woman has just exited the position. A similar propensity occurs to reappoint a male when a man leaves, although the effect is smaller than for women. The authors argue that this "gender-matching heuristic" can impede progress in attaining gender diversity, regardless of intention, because it emphasizes the replacement of existing women rather than changing board composition. The authors replicate this effect in follow-up laboratory studies and show that "what works" to increase the representation of women on boards, irrespective of gender matching, is to increase the number of women in the candidate pool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A Model is developed for how older adults make day-to-day transportation decisions. • Stated preference and card sorting tasks were used to develop and test the model. • 3 attribute categories are described: Motivators , Constraints/Enablers , and Context. • Compensatory and noncompensatory decision strategies are supported by the model. • The model can guide development of decision-making interventions and future research. Older adults in communities make daily decisions about how to meet their transportation needs so they can access services and stay socially connected. With the aging of populations in developed countries, the travel decisions of older adults will have increasing impacts. Research studies have identified different sets of factors that contribute to certain travel decisions, but little research has been directed towards understanding how individuals select information from all available factors, what information they include in their decisions under different circumstances, and the processes they use in making their transportation decisions. This exploratory study involved 20 men and 17 women, mean age 78.6 years (range 70–96), who drove weekly. All participants were involved in each phase of the 3-phase study. In Phase 1, a review of the literature and interviews with the participants was used to collect information, and inductive thematic analysis was employed to construct a draft conceptual model of older driver decision-making. In Phase 2, participants completed a stated preference task of written scenarios to demonstrate their decision-making strategies. Results were tabulated and used to refine a final Daily Driving Decisions model. In Phase 3, a card sorting decision task was used to test the model with participants. The final dynamic Daily Driving Decisions Model was confirmed to describe decision processes used by the participants in making decisions about how they would meet their transportation needs. The model describes three categories of factors used in decisions, labelled Motivators , Constraint/Enablers and Context , each containing four attribute themes. A significant finding was the variable use of the same item to either constrain or enable the decision to drive depending on the variation of other factors in the scenario. Participants demonstrated use of compensatory and noncompensatory (heuristic, habitual) decision processes that were accommodated by the model. The proposed Daily Driving Decisions Model addresses a gap in our understanding of how older drivers make their decisions about meeting their transportation needs. The model presents a template for classifying the types of information used, ignored or discarded by older adults, and the pathways that they take to arrive at their decisions. The model provides opportunities for further research in testing the influence of other factors such as urban/rural residence, income, health status and culture on driving decisions. Further, the model can be used by practitioners to gain insight into the decision-making behaviours of individuals and to develop interventions to enhance their decision-making skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies rely on individual contributions to sustain public goods that benefit the entire community. Several mechanisms, that specify how individuals change their decisions based on past experiences, have been proposed to explain how altruists are not outcompeted by selfish counterparts. A key aspect of such strategy updates involves a comparison of an individual's latest payoff with that of a random neighbour. In reality, both the economic and social milieu often shapes cooperative behaviour. We propose a new decision heuristic, where the propensity of an individual to cooperate depends on the local strategy environment in which she is embedded as well as her wealth relative to that of her neighbours. Our decision-making model allows cooperation to be sustained and also explains the results of recent experiments on social dilemmas in dynamic networks. Final cooperation levels depend only on the extent to which the strategy environment influences altruistic behaviour but are largely unaffected by network restructuring. However, the extent of wealth inequality in the community is affected by a subtle interplay between the environmental influence on a person's decision to contribute and the likelihood of reshaping social ties, with wealth-inequality levels rising with increasing likelihood of network restructuring in some situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Altruism can be spontaneously aroused by environmental factors. However, the mechanism behind these factors is subject to debate. We carried out a study of laboratory experiment using computer-based Mouselab method to determine the mechanism. We found that different colors altered the altruistic behaviors of people. Specifically, blue enhanced altruism, whereas red discouraged altruism. We used a process-tracing technique to monitor the selection of an adaptive strategy and demonstrate that different colors can simulate changes in information acquisition and then lead to the corresponding behaviors. The results suggested that the decision heuristic plays a mediating role in the link between colors and individual altruistic behaviors.

Altruism can be spontaneously aroused by environmental factors. However, the mechanism behind these factors is subject to debate. We carried out a study of laboratory experiment using computer-based Mouselab method to determine the mechanism. We found that different colors altered the altruistic behaviors of people. Specifically, blue enhanced altruism, whereas red discouraged altruism. We used a process-tracing technique to monitor the selection of an adaptive strategy and demonstrate that different colors can simulate changes in information acquisition and then lead to the corresponding behaviors. The results suggested that the decision heuristic plays a mediating role in the link between colors and individual altruistic behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union energy label informs consumers at the point of sale about the energy efficiency and electricity consumption of various electric goods. The label should enable consumers to purchase energy-friendly products (i.e., products with low energy consumption), thereby making a significant contribution to the reduction of overall energy consumption. This paper offers a systematic analysis of consumers' interpretation of the energy label. The results of a set of experimental studies revealed that consumers tend to base their estimates of a product's energy consumption mainly on the energy efficiency class (e.g., A) communicated on the energy label and largely ignore information about annual electricity consumption (e.g., 120 kWh/year). Thereby, consumers potentially overestimate the energy friendliness of a product assigned a high energy efficiency rating. This also holds true when consumers directly compare two products in terms of energy friendliness. Thus, participants chose a higher-consuming product because it had a high energy efficiency rating. High energy efficiency ratings (e.g., A +++ ) can distort consumers' perceptions of product categories that consume excessively (e.g., freezers). Participants were seduced into thinking that a high energy efficiency rating (e.g., A ++ ) means the energy consumption of energy hogs is no longer problematic. This paper provides evidence that the energy label could have a contrary effect than the one intended due to people's susceptibility to an energy efficiency fallacy. This misinterpretation of the energy label could further explain why overall energy demand is increasing despite enhanced energy efficiency. Finally, implications for policy makers and further research for enhancement of the energy label are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites (SNSs) such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users' movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google's Plus One button, Facebook's Like button, and Twitter's Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum's decision heuristic derived from her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user's privacy is being violated by this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional policies to achieve water quality goals assign a unique pollution control technology to every pollution source in a watershed, thereby defining a watershed strategy. For watersheds with even a modest number of pollution sources and control alternatives, the decision problem has combinatorial complexity. The perception of complexity—manifested in innumerable feasible watershed strategies—commonly induces the use of simplifying decision heuristics and ad hoc decision rules that reduce decision complexity by limiting the choice set to a “manageable” number of alternatives. In problems with large complex choice sets, these decision heuristics simplify decision making by excluding the vast majority of feasible alternatives a priori. In contrast, watershed-scale optimization enables decision makers to consider all feasible alternatives implicitly, exploiting rather than restricting the complexity of the feasible choice set. This contrast is illustrated using mixed-integer linear programming to identify interstate watershed strategies that achieve Chesapeake Bay nutrient reduction goals for the Potomac River Basin. The use of optimization in collaborative decision making helped refine and capture decision makers’ underlying values and preferences in policy-relevant constraints reflecting equity and political feasibility. Optimization formulations incorporating these constraints identified more effective and desirable management alternatives that would not otherwise have been considered using familiar decision heuristics and traditional comparisons among a limited number of ad hoc scenarios. Incorporating optimization in collaborative decision making generated superior watershed strategies and eased the cognitive limitations on decision making by substituting the computational burden of solving mixed-integer linear programs for decision makers’ cognitive burden of enumerating alternatives and scenarios for environmental systems with combinatorial complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goals of the present study were (1) to demonstrate again that subjects in social decision tasks involving shared resources cannot be modelled as strategic money maximizers, and (2) to investigate further factors that affect the use of what we have called social decision heuristics. Subjects were led to believe that they were the first of six group members to extract points from a common pool of points. Each point extracted could possibly be exchanged for cash. The independent variables were the magnitude of the payoffs that subjects could receive (high vs. low), the divisibility of the resource (divisible vs. nondivisible), the perceived control of the last members over the group's outcomes (fate control v.s. no fate control), and subjects' social values (cooperative vs. noncooperative). The results indicated that subjects anchored their decisions on an equal division heuristic. Subjects withdrew the fewest number of points when the resource was divisible, the payoffs were low, and there was fate control. The most points were taken when the resource was nondivisible, the payoffs were high, and subjects were classified as noncooperative. A model of the choice process in this task is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]