Public policies must be devised in spite of profound uncertainties about the future. When there are many plausible scenarios for the future, it may well be impossible to construct any single static policy that will perform well in all of them. It is likely, however, that the uncertainties that confront planners will be resolved over the course of time by new information. Thus, policies should b...

In program evaluation, determining whether a program is reaching its goals is key to evaluating program success. Having an understanding of the stated goals of each organization within a system rather than simply knowing the formal system goals can aid in program development and inform policy making. Evaluability assessments were used initially as a means of learning how Philadelphia delinquenc...

The paper aims at addressing the problem of what makes specific aiding to decide within public policy making problem situations. Under such a perspective it analyses some basic concepts such as “public policy”, “deliberation”, “legitimation”, “accountability” and shows the necessity to expand the concept of rationality which is expected to be behind the acceptability of a public policy. We then...

In many multi-agent applications such as distributed sensor nets, a network of agents act collaboratively under uncertainty and local interactions. Networked Distributed POMDP (ND-POMDP) provides a framework to model such cooperative multi-agent decision making. Existing work on ND-POMDPs has focused on offline techniques that require accurate models, which are usually costly to obtain in pract...

In many multi-agent applications such as distributed sensor nets, a network of agents act collaboratively under uncertainty and local interactions. Networked Distributed POMDP (ND-POMDP) provides a framework to model such cooperative multi-agent decision making. Existing work on ND-POMDPs has focused on offline techniques that require accurate models, which are usually costly to obtain in pract...

We prove existence of stationary Markov perfect equilibria in an infinite-horizon model of legislative policy making in which the policy outcome in one period determines the status quo in the next. We allow for a multidimensional policy space and arbitrary smooth stage utilities. We prove that all such equilibria are essentially in pure strategies and that proposal strategies are differentiable...

This paper is concerned with the application of collaboration engineering to improve the quality of policy-making processes. Policies are needed to guide complex decision-making. The creation of such policies is a collaborative process. The quality of this collaboration has a profound impact on the quality of the resulting policies and the acceptance by its stakeholders. We therefore focus on t...

Pierre-Gerlier Forest and his colleagues make a strong argument for the need to expand policy capacity among healthcare actors. In this commentary, I develop an additional argument in support of Forest et al view. Forest et al rightly point to the need to have embedded policy experts to successfully translate healthcare reform policy into healthcare change. Translation of externally generated i...

This paper uses theories of policy learning and of policy-making to examine how global institutions such as the WTO can influence policy choices. In pure learning by doing, policy choices are based on information relating to the history of an active policy; there is no information on alternative policies. New information on priors provides an incentive to choose a different policy. In the case ...

background the inclusion of cost-effectiveness data, as a basis for priority setting rankings, is a distinguishing feature in the formulation of the swedish national guidelines. guidelines are generated with the direct intent to influence health policy and support decisions about the efficient allocation of scarce healthcare resources. certain medical conditions may be given higher priority ran...