Decision Analysis and Political Processes

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL PROCESSES for

Mechanisms in Political Processes

Ostensibly theoretical disputes in political science often involve competing approaches to explanation. Competing positions include skepticism, covering law arguments, reconstructions of propensities, system models, and explanations featuring causal mechanisms. Mechanismand process-based accounts including cognitive, environmental, and relational effects deserve more attention than they have re...

political decision making

The decisions of a country’s top-level political leaders are often profoundly consequential; they can have implications for social order and justice, economic prosperity and growth, and war and peace. What do the decision processes of these leaders look like? How are problems identified? How are choices made? To address these questions is to confront a problem: analysts have only limited access...

Structured Reachability Analysis for Markov Decision Processes

Recent research in decision theoretic planning has focussed on making the solution of Markov decision processes (MDPs) more feasible. We develop a family of algorithms for structured reachability analysis of MDPs that are suitable when an initial state (or set of states) is known. Using compact, structured representations of MDPs (e.g., Bayesian networks), our methods, which vary in the tradeof...

Reachability Analysis of Quantum Markov Decision Processes

We introduce the notion of quantum Markov decision process (qMDP) as a semantic model of nondeterministic and concurrent quantum programs. It is shown by examples that qMDPs can be used in analysis of quantum algorithms and protocols. We study various reachability problems of qMDPs both for the finite-horizon and for the infinite-horizon. The (un)decidability and complexity of these problems ar...