Recently, there is a growing trend of filing intrafamilial tort actions, especially against spouses. In the past, and, to a certain extent, even at present, immunities existed in common law against tort litigation within the family. Is it appropriate today to block such claims, or should they be...

Rationale: The minimally important difference (MID) represents the smallest change on a patient reported outcome which can be considered important. Currently, only Walters and Brazier (2005) have published MID data for health utilities. Their results suggested that the MID preference-based...

Problems noted with current patterns in patent litigation include the increasing cost of patent litigation, low incentives to invalidate weak patents because doing so could help competitors, and a high incentive to settle patent suits because of the high cost of bringing such cases to trial. The...

By combining our broad panel survey of Japanese adults from 2005 to 2008 and actual cigarette tax data, we investigate how smoking behavior including responses to tax hikes depends on time discounting and its biases, such as hyperbolic discounting and the sign effect. Cigarette consumption...

In this paper, I discuss transnational mobility using a perspective that emphasizes conflicts at macro, mezzo and micro levels while seeking ways in which such a conflict model of migration can be developed. I outline areas involving different degrees of conflict which are better seen on a...

Extant research on hedonic goods has largely assumed that consumers justify consumption before consuming. However, in everyday life, consumers often justify hedonic consumption after consuming. For instance, a dieter may exercise in the few days after eating a luxurious chocolate cake. In three...

I start this contribution with an overview of my personal involvement - as an Operations Research consultant - in several engineering case-studies that may raise ethical questions; these case studies employ simulation models. Next, I present an overview of the recent literature on ethical issues...

Classical liberalism stresses the desirability of free markets, limited government and the rule of law. As such, it builds on some moral judgments. According to ethical objectivism, such judgments (in themselves always personal and subjective) can be true or false since objective moral facts...

This paper reviews the overview of the dynamic shortest path routing problem and the various neural networks to solve it. Different shortest path optimization problems can be solved by using various neural networks algorithms. The routing in packet switched multi-hop networks can be described as...