Background Kenya introduced a free maternity policy in 2013 to address the cost barrier associated with accessing maternal health services. We carried out a mixed methods process evaluation of the policy to examine the extent to which the policy had been implemented according to design, and positive experiences and challenges encountered during implementation.   Methods We conducted a mixed met...

Heterogeneous servers, in manufacturing and service systems, may have different speeds and different quality levels for the provided service or good. For a two-server queueing model, we formulate the job routing problem for minimizing the long-run weighted sum of the expected time spent in the system and the throughput of unsatisfied customers. Using a Markov decision process approach, we prove...

We investigate the optimal design of bank regulation by developing a tractable general equilibrium model of competitive banks who are exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. A comparison of the autarkic equilibrium allocations with the efficient allocations reveals that the autarkic economy underinvests in production when aggregate risk is below a threshold, but overinvests in production w...

We consider two queueing control problems that are stochastic versions of the economic lot scheduling problem: A single server processes N customer classes, and completed units enter a 'nished goods inventory that services exogenous customer demand. Unsatis'ed demand is backordered, and each class has its own general service time distribution, renewal demand process, and holding and backorderin...

We show that the optimal decision policy for several types of Bayesian sequential detection problems has a threshold switching curve structure on the space of posterior distributions. This is established by using lattice programming and stochastic orders in a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) framework. A stochastic gradient algorithm is presented to estimate the optimal linear...

We analyze the effect of an individual insurance mandate (Medicare Levy Surcharge) on the demand for private health insurance (PHI) in Australia. With administrative income tax return data, we show that the mandate has several distinct effects on taxpayers' behavior. First, despite the large tax penalty for not having PHI coverage relative to the cost of the cheapest eligible insurance policy, ...

We show that the optimal decision policy for several types of Bayesian sequential detection problems has a threshold switching curve structure on the space of posterior distributions. This is established by using lattice programming and stochastic orders in a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) framework. A stochastic gradient algorithm is presented to estimate the optimal linear...