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Economic progress is the result of entrepreneurship that introduces new and improved products into markets, and uncovers more efficient production processes. Entrepreneurial activity takes place in an uncertain environment, and is the result of the conscious choices of entrepreneurs. Economic progress cannot occur without the conscious choices of individuals, both as entrepreneurs and as consumers. This paper compares the concept of conscious choice with the frequently-used concept of rational choice. The study of consciousness has been multidisciplinary, mostly within philosophy, biology, and psychology. Economics has had little to offer to the study of consciousness, and has taken little from that interdisciplinary area of inquiry. This paper offers economists an introduction to the study of conscious choice, and shows why conscious choice is essential to the creation of economic progress.

This paper considers the recently introduced family of reference models dedicated to non-ordered alternatives. The link function of reference models is that of the multinomial logit model (MNL) replacing the logistic cumulative distribution function (cdf) by other cdfs (e.g., Gumbel, Student). We determine all usual economic outputs (willingness-to-pay, elasticities,...). We also show that the IIA property generally does not hold for this family of models, because of their noninvariance to the alternative chosen as a reference. We estimate and compare five reference models to the MNL on a travel mode-choice survey: according to the chosen cdf, reference models lead to a better fit and retrieve consistent economic outputs estimations even when there is a high unobserved heterogeneity.

Background Little research is available regarding vaccination attitudes among those recently diagnosed with COVID-19. This is important to investigate, particularly among those experiencing mild-to-moderate illness, given the ongoing need to improve uptake of both initial vaccine series and booster doses, and the divergent ways such an experience could impact attitudes. Methods From September 3 – November 12, 2021, all patients enrolled in Baylor Scott & White’s “COVID-19 Digital Care Journey for Home Monitoring” were invited to participate in an online survey that included questions about vaccination status and attitudes/opinions regarding COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines. Following an item asking about accordance of COVID-19 vaccination with religious/personal beliefs, participants were asked to describe those beliefs and how they relate to taking/not taking the vaccine. Results Of 8,075 patients age ≥ 18 years diagnosed with COVID-19 and invited to join the survey during the study period, 3242 (40.2%) were fully vaccinated. In contrast, among the 149 who completed the questionnaire, 95(63.8%) reported full vaccination. Responses differed significantly between vaccination groups. The vaccinated group strongly agreed that COVID-19 is a major public health problem, the vaccines are safe and effective, and their decision to vaccinate included considering community benefit. The unvaccinated group responded neutrally to most questions addressing safety and public health aspects of the vaccine, while strongly disagreeing with statements regarding vaccine effectiveness and other preventative public health measures. The vaccinated group strongly agreed that taking the vaccine accorded with their religious/personal beliefs, while the unvaccinated group was neutral. In qualitative analysis of the free text responses “risk perception/calculation” and “no impact” of religious/personal beliefs on vaccination decisions were frequent themes/subthemes in both groups, but beliefs related to the “greater good” were a strong driver among the vaccinated, while statements emphasizing “individual choice” were a third frequent theme for the unvaccinated. Conclusion Our results show that two of the three factors that drive vaccine hesitancy (complacency, and lack of confidence in the vaccines) are present among unvaccinated adults recently diagnosed with COVID-19. They also show that beliefs emphasizing the importance of the greater good promote public health participation.

Regarding the issue of individual purchasing behavior in the rapid growth of electric vehicles, this article studies the diffusion model of electric vehicles considering individual choices and social effects from the perspective of the scale and quantity changes of electric vehicles. First, the neural network was used to predict the charging data of electric vehicles, and the economic effects of purchasing electric vehicles were calculated by combining the purchase cost and government subsidies. Then, the utility function for owners to purchase electric or traditional fuel vehicles was created by considering economic effects, cognitive attitudes, and social effects as factors that individuals need to consider when purchasing electric or traditional fuel vehicles. Finally, the discrete choice model was used to calculate the probability of users choosing to purchase electric or traditional fuel vehicles, and the number of electric vehicles was statistically calculated. Analysis of simulation examples shows that the growth rate of fuel vehicles decreases year by year during the simulation period, and the trend of electric vehicle growth follows an S-curve.

We examined the influence of locus of control on the relationship between social exclusion and preference for distinctive choices. Participants were 212 undergraduate students at a university in Central China, who completed measures of social exclusion, locus of control, choice, and perceived uniqueness. Results showed that participants who believed that the environment controlled their fate (external locus of control) preferred more distinctive choices in a social exclusion context than in a social inclusion context, whereas participants who believed that they could control the environment (internal locus of control) preferred less distinctive choices. Further, perceived uniqueness mediated the effect of social exclusion and locus of control on choice. These results add to the literature on social exclusion and personal control.

The paper draws on the findings of a small-scale empirical study to discuss why the project of inclusion, despite a long history of legislative efforts from the Salamanca Statement onwards, still appears to be troubling. The study used scenarios to explore tensions between inclusion and individual choice experienced by young people in the context of everyday social interaction with reference to the intersection between disability, ethnicity, gender and social class. Building on the findings, we argue that understanding inclusion at the level of social interaction has important implications for inclusive education. We employ ideas from theoretical work on inclusion to suggest that in order to achieve inclusion in education or in society, a top down approach influenced by national and international policy and a rights discourse might not be sufficient; this is because inclusion processes also operate at the level of everyday social interaction where policy has less influence. Such processes, for instance individual choice, are often less explored or even ignored by the inclusion literature, as they are seen as questioning or threatening the moral imperative of including all people. This argument, thus, raises the question of how well we understand social inclusion in education and provides directions for further research.

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner's personality, hours of work, social participation and healthy lifestyle have substantial and similar effects on life satisfaction. The results have negative implications for a widely accepted theory of SWB, set-point theory. This theory holds that adult SWB is stable in the medium and long term, although temporary fluctuations occur due to life events. Set-point theory has come under increasing criticism in recent years, primarily due to unmistakable evidence in the German Socio-Economic Panel that, during the last 25 years, over a third of the population has recorded substantial and apparently permanent changes in life satisfaction (Fujita and Diener in J Pers Soc Psychol 88:158–64, 2005; Headey in Soc Indic Res 85:389–403, 2008a; Headey et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(42):17922–17926, 2010). It is becoming clear that the main challenge now for SWB researchers is to develop new explanations which can account for medium and long term change, and not merely stability in SWB. Set-point theory is limited precisely because it is purely a theory of stability. The paper is based on specially constructed panel survey files in which data are divided into multi-year periods in order to facilitate analysis of medium and long term change.

An intergenerational shift from more pro-family norms to individual-choice norms has been taking place since the 1980s. Conditions of economic and social security positively contributed to this shift especially in high-income countries. In this paper, we study the modernisation change on value structures in selected Central and Eastern European countries and compare them with Western European ones and look at the generational differences. We first check whether the value shift is moving in the assumed direction and whether it is copying trends observed in Western European countries. We then look at different generations to determine whether the younger generations in CEE countries that grew up after 1989, in a time of rapid economic and political change, show higher levels of post-materialist and post-modern values than the generations socialised and raised during the communist regime. We use data collected by the international repeated cross-sectional European Values Study (EVS). The results are not clear-cut on whether socioeconomic modernisation has led to higher shares of post-materialism, more genderegalitarian attitudes, and stronger support for individual-choice norms in CEE countries. In all the spheres of cultural modernisation analysed we found differences in values and attitudes between generations: the older generations were always more traditional than the younger generations. This was not just true in the CEE countries, as the same trend was recorded in the Western European countries.

In multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), challenges persist, including low diversity in external archives, ambiguous individual optimal choice mechanisms, high sensitivity to parameter settings, and the arduous task of balancing global exploration and local exploitation capabilities. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm named HCRMOPSO. The proposed algorithm innovatively leverages hierarchical clustering based on Ward’s linkage to generate the center of mass as reference points, which are then combined with the ideal point and crowding distance. This effectively maintains the external archive, thereby resolving the diversity deficiency commonly found in traditional MOPSO archives. Additionally, HCRMOPSO fuses multiple particles to update the personal best positions. It also adaptively tunes the flight parameters according to the diversity information within each particle’s neighborhood, enhancing the algorithm’s adaptability. Notably, a new strategy is designed for two specific types of particles, further optimizing the search process. The performance of HCRMOPSO is rigorously evaluated against ten existing algorithms on 22 standard test problems. Experimental results demonstrate that HCRMOPSO outperforms its counterparts on multiple benchmarks, showcasing superior effectiveness in handling multi-objective optimization tasks.

Probabilistic and fuzzy choice functions are used to describe decision situations in which some degree of uncertainty or imprecision is involved. We propose a way to equate these two formalisms by means of residual implication operations. Furthermore, a set of new rationality conditions for probabilistic choice functions is proposed and proved to be sufficient to ensure that the associated fuzzy choice function is rational.