background priority setting in healthcare is a key determinant of health system performance. however, there is no widely accepted priority setting evaluation framework. we reviewed literature with the aim of developing and proposing a framework for the evaluation of macro and meso level healthcare priority setting practices.   methods we systematically searched econlit, pubmed, cinahl, and ebsc...

Previous work in monetary policy futures markets under a single policy goal have shown this approach to be effective at eliminating the circularity problem inherent with private-sector targeting strategies. We extend this monetary policy setting framework to a typical multiple goal policy objective: inflation and output stabilization. We also demonstrate how the prices in policy futures markets...

BACKGROUND Development of health policy is a complex process that does not necessarily follow a particular format and a predictable trajectory. Therefore, agenda setting and selecting of alternatives are critical processes of policy development and can give insights into how and why policies are made. Understanding why some policy issues remain and are maintained whiles others drop off the agen...

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in a setting where each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. As opposed to the traditional static multi-armed bandit problem, this setting allows for dynamically changing rewards that better describe applications where side information is available. We adopt a nonparametric model where the expected rewa...

Algorithms for hyperparameter optimization abound, all of which work well under different and often unverifiable assumptions. Motivated by the general challenge of sequentially choosing which algorithm to use, we study the more specific task of choosing among distributions to use for random hyperparameter optimization. This work is naturally framed in the extreme bandit setting, which deals wit...

Understanding the degree of price stickiness and the nature of price setting is necessary for analyzing the effects of monetary policy on economy. To the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive study has examined the degree of price stickiness in Iran yet. For this reason, we examine the basic features of retail price setting behavior using a large data set containing the micro data underly...

We present a simple model of the macroeconomy that includes a role for an assetprice bubble, and derive optimal monetary policy settings for two policy-makers. The first policy-maker, a sceptic, does not attempt to forecast the future possible paths for the asset-price bubble when setting policy. The second policy-maker, an activist, takes into account the complete stochastic implications of th...

A tax on soft drinks is often proposed as a health promotion strategy for reducing their consumption and improving health outcomes. However, little is known about the processes and politics of implementing such taxes. We analysed four different soft drink taxes in Pacific countries and documented the lessons learnt regarding the process of policy agenda-setting and implementation. While local s...