Efforts to design public policies for social systems tend to confront highly complex conditions which have a large number of potentially relevant factors to be considered and rapidly changing conditions where continuous adaptation delays or obscures the effect of policies. Given unresolvable uncertainty in policy outcomes, the optimal solution is difficult, if ever possible, to nail down. It is...

Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) has an evolving nature and during the last decades its theoretical, conceptual, structural, practical and programmatic notions evolved significantly and approaches toward food and nutrition have changed drastically. Now, more than ever before, the issue is considered as a fundamental component of sustainable development globally. For a better grasp of the compl...

Decision support is not a cure-all or a panacea. Researchers and managers often focus too much on the anticipated positive consequences of using a specific Decision Support System (DSS). Using a computerized system to support decision making can have anticipated and unanticipated negative consequences. This essay is a starting point in assessing unintended negative consequences. There are many ...

In this study, we integrate tenets of the behavioral theory of the firm and neo-institutional theory to identify four recurring search mechanisms that are expected to influence hospital managers’ IS investment decisions. To account for the critical role of regulation in healthcare, we hypothesize senior managers’ reliance on each of these four search mechanisms to be contingent upon their hospi...

integrated urban management means adopting a holistic approach to urban management and designing appropriate mechanisms for this approach’s requirements in practice. the integration of the urban activities brings together organizational , structural and institutional activities and action in which the urban development is supported. in order to achieve integration, it is essential to identify f...

Systematic reviews are increasingly seen as helpful "knowledge support" for managers and policy makers, and deliberative processes are starting to be seen as promising, locally contextualized "decision support." Increases to the flow of systematic reviews should be complemented by efforts to facilitate the retrieval, and adapt the presentation, of the available stock of systematic reviews. Rese...

www.thelancet.com Vol 385 June 20, 2015 2445 Evidence-based policy making is an important aspirational goal, but only a small proportion of research has the policy impact it might have. Most researchers are not trained to create policy impact from their work, engagement with policy makers is not encouraged or rewarded in most settings, and the communication of scientifi c fi ndings occurs withi...

background: hiv/aids control are one of the most important goals of the health systems. the aim of this study was to determine how hiv/aids control was initiated among policy makers' agenda setting in iran.   methods: a qualitative research (semi-structured interview) was conducted using kingdon's framework (problem, policy and politics streams, and policy windows and policy entrepreneurs) to a...

BACKGROUND Decisions to adopt a particular innovation may vary between stakeholders because individual stakeholders may disagree on the costs and benefits involved. This may translate to disagreement between stakeholders on priorities in the implementation process, possibly explaining the slow diffusion of innovations in health care. In this study, we explore the differences in stakeholder pref...

his study aimed to investigate factors affecting the revenue share of Iranian tomato paste exporting companies. Flexible estimation method was used on a two-dimensional panel data set including 224 observations from 14 tomato paste manufacturing and exporting companies and 16 importing countries during 2005-12. Results showed that value added per employee in manufacturing or exporting companies...