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OBJECTIVE: To describe how patients choose between primary care institutions (PCIs) and non-PCIs using rational choice theory from the perspective of survival rationality, economic rationality, and social rationality. METHODS: Multi-stage stratified sampling and convenience sampling were applied to select 1723 patients to conduct the questionnaire survey. Chi-square test and binary logistic regression were performed to analyze the factors associated with patients' choice of PCIs. RESULTS: In total 55.83% of 1723 patients would attend a PCIs for healthcare. The results of the univariate analysis revealed that patients who are female (58.46%, P = .015), suffering from chronic diseases (56.26%, P = .047), inpatients (67.58%, P < .001), Beijing (59.62%, P = .002), partial understanding of the family doctor contracting system (62.30%, P < .001), and not understanding of the medical alliance policy (58.04%, P = .031) had significantly higher probability of choosing PCIs. Logistic regression analysis showed that females were more unwilling to attend PCIs (odds ratio (OR) = 0.822, 95%CI: 0.676-0.999). Following survival rationality, patients without chronic diseases were more likely to attend PCIs (OR = 1.834, 95%CI: 1.029-3.268), and inpatients were more unlikely to attend PCIs (OR = 0.581, 95%CI: 0.437-0.774). From an economic rationality perspective, patients from the Fujian province were more likely to attend PCIs (OR = 1.424, 95%CI: 1.081-1.876). From a social rationality perspective, patients who partial understanding of the family doctor contracting system were more unlikely to attend PCIs (OR = 0.701, 95%CI: 0.551-0.892), and patients who partial and complete understanding of the medical alliance policy were more likely to attend PCIs (OR = 1.340, 95%CI: 1.064-1.687; OR = 1.485, 95%CI: 1.086-2.030). CONCLUSIONS: Survival, economic, and social rationality are involved in patients' choice to attend PCIs. Compared to survival rationality and social rationality, economic rationality showed a lower association with patients' choice to attend PCIs. Medical institutions are recommended to adopt a "patient health-centered" approach when providing medical services and further optimize the family doctor contracting system and construction of medical alliances.

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Animals live in complex natural environments. Based on the effects of natural selection, theory on animal information use says that it is optimal for animals to make "rational" decisions, i.e., to choose alternatives which maximize fitness gains, irrespective of the number of alternatives presented to them. Yet, animals commonly make seemingly "irrational" choices in the face of complex and variable stimuli that challenge their cognitive machinery. Here, we test the choice overload hypothesis - decision-making is negatively affected when animals experience an overload of choice. Using simultaneous-choice trials that varied in choice repertoire size, we examined oviposition site selection behaviour in Aedes aegypti towards larval predators, the nymphs of Bradinopyga geminata. Based on the underlying fitness trade-offs of oviposition decision-making, we predicted that female oviposition preference would be weaker and variation in this response would be higher in complex, multiple-choice trials than in binary-choice trials. In partial support of our hypothesis, oviposition preference was weaker in the complex, multiple-choice trials, but the variation in response depended on predator density, and did not depend on choice repertoire size. We suggest that information overload can negatively affect certain aspects of animal decision-making, resulting in choices appearing as "irrational" if the complexity of the decision-making context is not incorporated. Information overload can potentially lead to alternative strategies, such as bet-hedging or decision-making with reduced discrimination.

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[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2023.1140901.].

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The present work revisits how artificial intelligence, as technology and ideology, is based on the rational choice theory and the techno-liberal discourse, supported by large corporations and investment funds. Those that promote using different algorithmic processes (such as filter bubbles or echo chambers) create homogeneous and polarized spaces that reinforces people's ethical, ideological, and political narratives. These mechanisms validate bubbles of choices as statements of fact and contravene the prerequisites for exercising deliberation in pluralistic societies, such as the distinction between data and values, the affirmation of reasonable dissent, and the relevance of diversity as a condition indispensable for democratic deliberation.

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The agent-based model is the principal scientific instrument of generative social science. Typically, we design completed agents-fully endowed with rules and parameters-to grow macroscopic target patterns from the bottom up. Inverse generative science (iGSS) stands this approach on its head: Rather than handcrafting completed agents to grow a target-the forward problem-we start with the macro-target and evolve micro-agents that generate it, stipulating only primitive agent-rule constituents and permissible combinators. Rather than specific agents as designed inputs, we are interested in agents-indeed, families of agents-as evolved outputs. This is the backward problem and tools from Evolutionary Computing can help us solve it. In this overarching essay of the current JASSS Special Section, Part 1 discusses the motivation for iGSS. Part 2 discusses its goals, as distinct from other approaches. Part 3 discusses how to do it concretely, previewing the five iGSS applications that follow. Part 4 discusses several foundational issues for agent-based modeling and economics. Part 5 proposes a central future application of iGSS: to evolve explicit formal alternatives to the Rational Actor, with Agent_Zero as one possible point of evolutionary departure. Conclusions and future research directions are offered in Part 6. Looking 'backward to the future,' I also include, as Appendices, a pair of 1992 memoranda to the then President of the Santa Fe Institute on the forward (growing artificial societies from the bottom up) and backward (iGSS) problems.

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With the rapid growth of the urban population, the development of production and consumption, and improved living standards, waste generation has increased over time. The first positive step to solve the problem of household waste is waste separation behavior. Studying the determinants that prompt individuals to comply with waste separation policy (WSP) is worthwhile. The author aims to offer an integrated view of individuals' compliance with waste separation policy based on rational choice and deterrence theories. Survey data collected from 306 households in South Korea are used to test the research model using partial least squares analysis. The study shows that WSP compliance intention is motivated by the perceived benefit and perceived effectiveness of WSP. Furthermore, the results show that perceived deterrent severity and perceived deterrent certainty positively influence WSP compliance intention. The implications for theory and policymakers are discussed to facilitate waste separation behavior.

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This study examined the socio-economic factors influencing choice of climate change adaptation practices and the effects of these practices on cassava productivity in Nigeria. Using a multi-stage sampling technique, structured questionnaire was used to survey 100 cassava farmers. The result was analyzed with a multivariate probit and generalized linear regression models. The result showed male dominance (78%) in cassava farming and the mean age of the cassava farmers was 45.46 ± 9.36 years. About 66% of the farmers belonged to cooperative associations and 67% had access to credit facilities. The multivariate model revealed that age of farmers, gender, education qualification, primary occupation, total income, membership of cooperative associations, farming objectives, farming experience, access to extension visit, access to credit, type of land ownership, farm size and climatic conditions significantly influenced choice of climate change adaptation practices among cassava farmers. The generalized linear model identified farming system, multiple crop types/improved crop varieties used, crop diversification, organic manuring, multiple planting dates, use of alternate fallowing, education and credit access to significantly affect cassava productivity. The study concluded that, eco-friendly methods for adapting to climate change increase cassava productivity. Thus, cassava farmers should be trained on the use of best climate change adaptation practices that can boost cassava productivity. In order to practice climate smart farming, it is important to stress the usage of organic manure and alternate fallowing.

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This study examines the specificities of sexual homicides involving male victims. First, this study aims to identify characteristics specific to SH involving male victims by comparing them to SH involving female victims and determine whether rational choice approach and routine activities theories are useful to explain the crime-commission process. Second, this study aims to provide the first empirical classification of SH involving male victims. The sample used in this research comes from the Sexual Homicide International Database (SHIelD) including 662 cases of cases-100 cases involving male victims and 552 involving female victims. Bivariate and multivariate analysis are performed to examine the differences between the two groups and latent class analysis is used to generate an empirical classification of cases involving male victims. Findings indicate the victim's gender plays an important role in the different choices made by sexual homicide offenders of male victims to successfully complete their crime. They adapted their crime-commission process to overcome the risks associated with a physical confrontation with a male victim (i.e., target selection, approach strategy, method of killing). Classification analysis suggests that it exists three different types of sexual murderers assaulting male victims: the robber sexual murderer, the sadistic sexual murderer, and the pedophile murderer. This research proposes the first empirical typology of sexual homicide involving male victims and provides both a true picture of the reality and a comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon.

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To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that compliance in this setting was shaped by a combination of variables originating from legitimacy, capacity, and opportunity theories (but not rational choice or social theories). This demonstrates the importance of moving beyond narrow theoretical perspectives of compliance, to a cross-theoretical understanding-in which different theoretical approaches are systematically integrated.

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Background: COVID-19 is now a global public health crisis with unprecedented political, economic, and social consequences affecting nations across the world. It also has a profound impact on the mobility of international students. When the COVID-19 was under control in China, and it was spreading dramatically in the United Kingdom, Chinese international students studying in the United Kingdom have been caught in a double bind over whether to return home or not. Objective: This study aims to explore the factors that influenced Chinese international students' choices of return during the COVID-19 pandemic when the COVID-19 was under control in China, while it was spreading dramatically in the United Kingdom. Methods: Taking Chinese international students studying in the United Kingdom as an empirical case, this study used qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the factors that influenced their choices of return. Based on the Rational Choice Theory and qualitative analysis of text data, this paper constructed the influencing factors model of returning to China. On this basis, we developed a questionnaire and collected data from 1,333 students in late April and early May 2020. Binary Logistic Regression with 95% CI for odds ratio (OR) was used to identify significant factors. Results: The reserve of epidemic prevention supplies (OR = 0.712), transportation expenses (OR = 0.618), and quarantine expenses (OR = 0.702) negatively affected the return choice of overseas students. The supply of daily necessities (OR = 1.495), the anti-epidemic policy of the United Kingdom (OR = 1.684), and the demand for job hunting after graduation (OR = 1.661) had positive effects. Conclusion: The institutional rationality had the biggest promoting effect, replaced development rationality, and became the most important factor for overseas students to return to China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic rationality, which has a significant negative effect, is the biggest obstacle to returning home. These conclusions have policy implications for governments' response to the COVID-19 epidemic and improvement of the quality of services for overseas students.

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This study investigated the land tenure system, harvesting time and marketing behaviour of cashew farmers in Ghana. Primary data was compiled from 120 cashew farmers, and the multinomial probit was used to assess the determinants of cashew marketing outlets. Types of land ownership (tenure system) for cashew production in Ghana were leasehold, stool, family, state and customary lands. The sales of cashew nuts to buying companies and/or exporters is positively influenced by the land tenure system, good road network, weekly harvest, contract agreements and grading of cashew nuts. Conversely, the experience of farmers coupled with less than one week of harvesting influences the choice of brokers' outlet. The result implies that, cashew cultivation on stool land, likewise harvesting time increases the probability of selling to buying companies and exporters who offered higher margins compared with brokers. Consequently, generic land reform for the whole country to enhance agribusinesses may be important but unnecessary. It is also suggested that the customary land arrangement provided the opportunity to sell to a profitable marketing outlet, it is suggested that Government and NGOs should rather be interested in strengthening the current customary land regime and consultatively recommend for review where necessary in the study areas.

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This study integrates two competing views to examine whether medical doctors are satisfied with their jobs when they perceive their hospitals as being oriented toward profit (i.e., rational choice theory) or purpose (i.e., public service motivation). Using a sample of 127 doctors from 70 hospitals, this study tests these competing views. The results show that doctors who perceive their hospitals as purpose-driven are likely to experience job satisfaction, and this pattern still holds even if they also perceive their hospitals to be emphasizing profits. However, only the purpose-driven orientation results in job satisfaction via a sense of meaningfulness. Thus, this study offers comprehensive evidence that while medical doctors are likely to be satisfied with their jobs when they work at either purpose-driven or profit-driven hospitals, only purpose-driven hospitals give doctors a sense of meaningfulness. This finding suggests that both rational choice theory and public service motivation perspective are valid; however, public service motivation plays a greater role in terms of a sense of meaningfulness. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

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This essay discusses the difficulty to reconcile two paradigms about beliefs: the binary or categorical paradigm of yes/no beliefs and the probabilistic paradigm of degrees of belief. The possibility for someone to hold beliefs of both types simultaneously is challenged by the lottery paradox, and more recently by a general impossibility theorem by Dietrich and List. The nature, relevance, and implications of the tension are explained and assessed.

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The question of how to frame agential preferences in economics finds one caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If preferences are framed in as minimal and deflationary a manner as revealed preference theory recommends, the theory falls prey to objections about its predictiveness and explanatory power. Alternatively, if too many cognitive and causal intricacies are incorporated into the preference concept, revealed preference models will violate pragmatic norms of model construction, surrendering model simplicity and generality. This paper charts a middle course, arguing that the path to salvation lies through an understanding of revealed preference models as program explanations.

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The concept of expertise applied to the criminal context assumes that offenders are driven by the abilities to both maximize the payoffs and minimize the risks associated with the crime-commission. This study tested the articulation between these two types of decisions taken by stranger rapists to successfully commit their crime. Specifically, this study aims to identify whether offenders whose modus operandi is indicative of criminal expertise are more likely to use forensic awareness strategies. Multivariate analyses conducted on 1,551 cases showed that stranger rapists who adopted behaviors indicative of expertise were more likely to use forensic awareness strategies to decrease the risk of police detection. Mixed associations were found between the number of forensic awareness strategies and their nature (i.e., protecting identity vs. destroying evidence) and rapists' expertise, thus leading to a four-type theoretical classification of expertise: novice, bold, opportunistic, and expert stranger rapists. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

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Retaliatory killings caused by human-wildlife conflict have a significant impact on the survival of leopards. This study explores the reasons for retaliatory killings of leopards by interviewing community members in a small village in South Africa that experienced high incidences of human-leopard conflict. The semi-structured interviews focused on the reasons why retaliatory leopard killings occurred and how to best mitigate the situational factors that triggered these killings. Respondents cited four main problems that fueled these killings: the government's response to human-leopard conflict was slow and unwilling; this response involved inefficient methods; there were inadequate resources to respond to these killings; and there was a clear lack of laws or their application. Local stakeholders provided a range of innovative strategies to reduce human-leopard conflict and retaliatory killings. While all parties expressed different reasons why these solutions were or were not effective, their conclusions were often similar. The distrust that existed between the parties prevented them from recognizing or accepting their common ground. Based on existing human-wildlife conflict mitigation techniques and solutions identified by local stakeholders, this article explores how criminological techniques, including situational crime prevention, can help identify and frame effective interventions to reduce the number of illegal leopard killings driven by human-wildlife conflict.

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OBJECTIVE: With the advancement of mobile technologies, patients can access medical and patient educational information anytime and anywhere. Computer-aided patient education has been advocated as a key means of interventions for improving patient knowledge and compliance (i.e., adherence). However, evidence of the efficacy of computer-aided patient education remains relatively limited. For example, little is known about how the latest mobile technologies influence patients' compliance intention and their actual compliance behavior. The objective of this study is to investigate patients' compliance intention and behavior using a personalized mobile patient education system (PMPES) as a novel technological intervention for patients based on rational choice theory (RCT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB). MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a field survey with 125 actual patients in U.S. who obtained their patient education through PMPES while seeking medical treatment advice from their doctors. We used partial least squares (PLS) regression path modeling to test our model. RESULTS: We found that, based on RCT, the benefits of compliance and cost/threat of noncompliance positively influenced intention toward treatment compliance; in contrast, costs of compliance negatively influenced intention toward treatment compliance. However, the benefits of noncompliance had no effect on intention toward treatment compliance. The results also indicated that intention toward treatment compliance, response efficacy, and self-efficacy related to TPB jointly influenced the degree of actual compliance behaviors. Social influence factors including subjective norms and descriptive norms had no influence on patients' actual treatment compliance behavior. CONCLUSION: Overall, the research model explains 69.2 % of the variance in patients' actual compliance behavior. We find our model robust in using RCT as a key theoretical lens for the assessment of patients' compliance intention to follow medical recommendations enabled by the PMPES and delivered to mobile devices. The factors associated with RCT and TPB jointly influence patients' actual compliance behavior. Future mobile patient education programs should consider patients' age groups, mixed-gender groups, different medical settings, and cross-cultural contexts.

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Rational choice theory (RCT) is a classical theory in criminology, with deep roots in the Enlightenment. It has secured a privileged place as a mainstream criminological theory in the United States. Ironically, RCT has not been applied to research on juvenile delinquency and related decision making in China. This study attempts to test the relative utility of RCT among adjudicated juvenile offenders incarcerated in an institution located in a southwestern province of China based on their responses to two hypothetical scenarios of offending. The results of the Tobit model analyses emerged from the two-wave longitudinal data lent strong support to the view that RCT can indeed serve as an important theory for explaining delinquent behaviors in China. More specifically, juvenile offenders used cost-benefit analysis to decide if they want to be involved either in the stealing scenario or in the fighting scenario. A discussion of findings and public policy implications are highlighted at the end of the paper.

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The critics of rational choice theory (RCT) frequently build on the contrast between so-called thick and thin applications of RCT to argue that thin RCT lacks the potential to explain the choices of real-world agents. In this paper, I draw on often-cited RCT applications in several decision sciences to demonstrate that despite this prominent critique there are at least two different senses in which thin RCT can explain real-world agents' choices. I then defend this thesis against the most influential objections put forward by the critics of RCT. In doing so, I explicate the implications of my thesis for the ongoing philosophical debate concerning the explanatory potential of RCT and the comparative merits of widely endorsed accounts of explanation.

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BACKGROUND: The health care industry has more insider breaches than any other industry. Soon-to-be graduates are the trusted insiders of tomorrow, and their knowledge can be used to compromise organizational security systems. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper was to identify the role that monetary incentives play in violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's (HIPAA) regulations and privacy laws by the next generation of employees. The research model was developed using the economics of crime literature and rational choice theory. The primary research question was whether higher perceptions of being apprehended for violating HIPAA regulations were related to higher requirements for monetary incentives. METHODS: Five scenarios were developed to determine if monetary incentives could be used to influence subjects to illegally obtain health care information and to release that information to individuals and media outlets. The subjects were also asked about the probability of getting caught for violating HIPAA laws. Correlation analysis was used to determine whether higher perceptions of being apprehended for violating HIPAA regulations were related to higher requirements for monetary incentives. RESULTS: Many of the subjects believed there was a high probability of being caught. Nevertheless, many of them could be incentivized to violate HIPAA laws. In the nursing scenario, 45.9% (240/523) of the participants indicated that there is a price, ranging from US $1000 to over US $10 million, that is acceptable for violating HIPAA laws. In the doctors' scenario, 35.4% (185/523) of the participants indicated that there is a price, ranging from US $1000 to over US $10 million, for violating HIPAA laws. In the insurance agent scenario, 45.1% (236/523) of the participants indicated that there is a price, ranging from US $1000 to over US $10 million, for violating HIPAA laws. When a personal context is involved, the percentages substantially increase. In the scenario where an experimental treatment for the subject's mother is needed, which is not covered by insurance, 78.4% (410/523) of the participants would accept US $100,000 from a media outlet for the medical records of a politician. In the scenario where US $50,000 is needed to obtain medical records about a famous reality star to help a friend in need of emergency medical transportation, 64.6% (338/523) of the participants would accept the money. CONCLUSIONS: A key finding of this study is that individuals perceiving a high probability of being caught are less likely to release private information. However, when the personal context involves a friend or family member, such as a mother, they will probably succumb to the incentive, regardless of the probability of being caught. The key to reducing noncompliance will be to implement organizational procedures and constantly monitor and develop educational and training programs to encourage HIPAA compliance.