The United States Federal Communications Commission delivered to Congress a national broadband plan in 2010. The purpose of this article is to analyze key economic arguments involving the development of the broadband plan addressing open network and competition issues, to make recommendations to the Commission in its formulation of federal policy as to positions that make the most economic sens...

User-supplied domain control knowledge in the form of hierarchically structured Goal-Plan Trees (GPTs) is at the heart of a number of approaches to reasoning about action. Reasoning with GPTs connects the AAMAS community with other communities such as automated planning, and forms the foundation for important reasoning capabilities, especially intention progression in Belief-Desire-Intention (B...

In highly dynamic environments with uncertainty the elaboration of long or rigid plans is useless because the constructed plans are frequently dismissed by the arrival or new unexpected situations; in these cases, a “second-best” plan could rescue the situation. We present a new real-time planning method where we take into consideration the number and quality of future options of the next actio...

Private health plans that enroll Medicare beneficiaries--known as Medicare Advantage (MA) plans--are being paid $11 billion more in 2009 than it would cost to cover these beneficiaries in regular fee-for-service Medicare. To generate Medicare savings for offsetting the costs of health reform, the Obama Administration has proposed eliminating these extra payments to private insurers and institut...

Intelligent agents are classified into various types depending on whether they just react to the stimuli they perceive (reactive) or they develop plans to solve their own goals (proactive or goal-oriented). In practice, agents are a mixture of two layers since they perform reactive or proactive tasks depending on what is the most appropriate at a given time (hybrid agents). Bearing in mind the ...

background advocacy coalitions play an increasingly prominent role within the global health landscape, linking actors and institutions to attract political attention and resources. this paper examines how coalitions negotiate among themselves and exercise hidden forms of power to produce policy on the basis of their beliefs and strategic interests.   methods this paper examines the beliefs...

in many countries, particularly developing countries, economic reforms, especially privatization, are considered as a strategic approach. the growth of the government decreases the competition in the market, and so, some fields should be privatized in order to create the competition.  by moving towards privatization and the changes in competition methods and the presentation of the world trade,...