Focusing failures in competitive environments: explaining decision errors in the Monty Hall game,the Acquiring a Company problem,and multiparty ultimatums

This paper offers a unifying conceptual explanation for failures in competitive decision making across three seemingly unrelated tasks: the Monty Hall game (Nalebuff, 1987), the Acquiring a Company problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985), and multiparty ultimatums (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997). We argue that the failures observed in these three tasks have a common root. Specifically, due to a limited focus of attention, competitive decision makers fail properly to consider all of the information needed to solve the problem correctly. Using protocol analyses, we show that competitive decision makers tend to focus on their own goals, often to the exclusion of the decisions of the other parties, the rules of the game, and the interaction among the parties in light of these rules. In addition, we show that the failure to consider these effects explains common decision failures across all three games. Finally, we suggest that this systematic focusing error in competitive contexts can serve to explain and improve our understanding of many additional, seemingly disparate, competitive decision‐making failures. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Driver fatigue among military truck drivers

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Transport Center is the largest and the most diverse transportation organization in Israel: three times as large as the largest commercial fleet in Israel, and military bases are spread all over the country. It also has the ability to regulate the drivers better: enforcing diet, hours of sleep, and working hours. The drivers are either permanently employed civilians, career service personnel, or mandatory service personnel. This employment status correlates with age, experience, carrier type, and several job characteristics (for example mandatory service drivers typically do not drive at night).The study consisted of a survey of 314 male drivers (30% of the entire base driver population). Despite the different environment, the military drivers display many characteristics and coping-behaviors characteristic of civilian drivers. Our results cast a doubt on the efficacy of enforcing night sleep and prohibiting night drives as an alternative to regulating hours of service. Our findings also reveal that it is insufficient to provide drivers with the time to sleep. One has to ensure that they also get a good quality of sleep. Implications for reducing fatigue in this environment are suggested. We identified the mandatory service drivers (young, less experienced drivers, lower military ranks) as a group of drivers that falls asleep more often and to a greater extent. They are particularly sensitive to sleep deficits and influenced by external events such as aggravation and boredom.It is important to provide drivers with more in-vehicle, accessible countermeasures to counter fatigue since they often do not stop, particularly in short-haul conditions. Since the radio has a high level of usage and acceptance among drivers, it could be exploited as an interactive communications system, as an educational medium, and as an image-enhancing device.     

Thomas Aquinas on Virtuous Warfare

Thomas Aquinas, one of the "founding fathers" of just war theory, offers an account of virtuous warfare in practice. The author argues that Aquinas's approach to warfare, with its emphasis on justice and charity, is helpful in providing a coherent moral account of war to which Christians can subscribe. Particular attention is given to the role of charity, since this virtue is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian soldier. Charity compels him to soldier justly, and by fighting justly, he is elevated by God to friendship with God. Notable features of this approach are its emphasis on the criteria for judging whether a war is just and its relativizing of the criteria for proper combat behavior.     

What use has approved

The meaning of a word is given by a customary rule for its use. I defend that claim and explain its implications by a comparison with customary rules in law. I address two problems about customary rules: first, how can the mere facts of social practice yield a norm? Secondly, how can we explain disagreement about the requirements of a custom, if those requirements are determined by the shared practice of the participants in a community? These problems can be resolved in a way that illuminates customary rules, and helps to explain the relation between the meaning of a word and the customary rule for its use. The meaning of a word is the usefulness that it has because of the customary rule for its use.     

The Middle Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frege

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse Wittgenstein’s 1929–1932 notes concerning Frege’s critique of what is referred to as old formalism in the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein disagreed with Frege’s critique and, in his notes, outlined his own assessment of formalism. First of all, he approvingly foregrounded its mathematics-game comparison and insistence that rules precede the meanings of expressions. In this article, I recount Frege’s critique of formalism and address Wittgenstein’s assessment of it to show that his remarks are not so much a critique of Frege as rather a defence of the formalist anti-metaphysical investment.     

Assessment of generalised Bayesian structural equation models for continuous and binary data

The paper proposes a novel model assessment paradigm aiming to address shortcoming of posterior predictive $p$-values, which provide the default metric of fit for Bayesian structural equation modelling (BSEM). The model framework presented in the paper focuses on the approximate zero approach (Psychological Methods, 17 , 2012, 313), which involves formulating certain parameters (such as factor loadings) to be approximately zero through the use of informative priors, instead of explicitly setting them to zero. The introduced model assessment procedure monitors the out-of-sample predictive performance of the fitted model, and together with a list of guidelines we provide, one can investigate whether the hypothesised model is supported by the data. We incorporate scoring rules and cross-validation to supplement existing model assessment metrics for BSEM. The proposed tools can be applied to models for both continuous and binary data. The modelling of categorical and non-normally distributed continuous data is facilitated with the introduction of an item-individual random effect. We study the performance of the proposed methodology via simulation experiments as well as real data on the ‘Big-5’ personality scale and the Fagerstrom test for nicotine dependence.