The conclusions could act as a guide to support the optimal design of incentive policies and schemes within health organisations when healthcare professionals are intrinsically motivated.

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Sometimes individual agents display in their decisions a preference for having more opportunities to choose from. In this paper this fact is interpreted from a preference for flexibility approach, which links with the hypothesis that there is some uncertainty or vagueness in the decision maker's preferences. We define an asymmetric (but not necessarily transitive, or complete) preference on a finite universe of alternatives, X, to express that vagueness. Taking this preference as a reference, the notion of preference for flexibility is described by means of the axiomatic characterization of a class of binary relations over the possible subsets of X, which are interpreted as opportunity sets. Subsequently, we demonstrate the relationship between the results and the representation theorem of preference for flexibility proposed by Kreps [10]. Finally, it is shown how some special orderings of the related literature could be interpreted as elements of the class characterized here. * This work was possible thanks to the financial support of the Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEC96-0858). I appreciate comments and suggestions by Jorge Nieto, which were necessary for the completion of this paper. This paper has also benefited from the comments of

Background: HLA-G molecules are immunosuppressive and avoid fetal rejection by giving negative signals to maternal immune system from fetal trophoblast cell surface. HLA-G genes have been associated to different pathologies: Spontaneous abortions, autoimmunity, tumor progression, transplant rejection and infection. In addition, different World populations show remarkable different HLA-G allele frequencies in the allele that does not produce a full HLA-G molecule (HLA-G*05N); this allele is almost absent in studied Amerindians. Objectives: The aim is to study HLA-A.-B,-DRB1 and –G alleles and extended haplotypes in Amerindians for the first time. This may be useful to asses HLA-G epidemiology, association to disease and Preventive Medicine in Amerindians. Methods: HLA-A,-B and -DRB1 have been typed by using standard automatic protocols. HLA-G alleles have been detected by direct HLA-G exon 2, exon 3 and exon 4 DNA sequencing. Computer calculations have been done by specific standard methods. Results: HLA-A,-B,-DRB1 and –G extended haplotypes have been calculated in Amerindians for the first time. Also, their HLA-G frequencies have been compared with worldwide populations. Conclusion: Low frequencies of null HLA-G*01:05N allele are found in Amerindians. The extended haplotypes with this allele bear other typical Amerindian HLA-DRB1 alleles and its origin is discussed. HLA-G allele frequency profile is closer to that of Europeans than to that of Far East Asians. Our findings are useful to Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology associated to Fertility and HLA-G associated pathology and transplantation.

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SUMMARYThis work proposes a teleoperation architecture for mobile robots in partially unknown environments under the presence of variable time delay. The system is provided with artificial intelligence represented by a probabilistic path planner that, in combination with a prediction module, assists the operator while guaranteeing a collision-free motion. For this purpose, a certain level of autonomy is given to the system. The structure was tested in indoor environments for different kinds of operators. A maximum time delay of 2 s was successfully coped with.

Many recent works have investigated the problem of extending a preference over a set of alternatives to its power set, in an attempt to provide a formal representation of the notion of freedom of choice. In general, results are limited to the finite case, which excludes, for instance, the case of economic environments. This paper deals with the possibility of extending those results to the context where the basic set of alternatives is the n-dimensional Euclidean space. We present an extension of the leximax criterion described by Bossert, Pattanaik and Xu (1994) to this more general framework.