We consider the problem belief-state monitoring for the purposes of implementing a policy for a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP), specifically how one might approximate the belief state. Other schemes for beliefstate approximation (e.g., based on minimizing a measure such as KL-divergence between the true and estimated state) are not necessarily appropriate for POMDPs. Inste...

We show that the full version of the so-called ‘rural hospital theorem’ (Roth, 1986) generalizes to many-to-many matching where agents on both sides of the market have separable and substitutable preferences.

Contemporary public policy, supported by international arbitrators of blood policy such as the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross, asserts that the safest blood is that donated by voluntary, non-remunerated donors from low-risk groups of the population. These policies promote anonymous donation and discourage kin-based or replacement donation. However, t...

modern societies belief life insurance scheme, which is designed to be backbone of man survival, ensure financial security and offers readymade source of long term capital financing for the infrastructural project is capable of combating the besetting problem of man so that life can be made easy and continuous. the dramatic increase in competition within the insurance sector and the needs of in...

Most Canadians believe that certain drugs cause catastrophic addictions in people who use them. This conventional belief is reflected in such familiar phrases as "crack cocaine is instantly addictive" or "heroin is so good, don't even try it once". It is also implied in the professional literature which routinely describes certain drugs as "addictive", "dependency producing", or "habit forming"...

Many clinicians believe that allowing costs to influence clinical decisions is unethical. They are mistaken in this belief, because it cannot be ethical to ignore the adverse consequences upon others of the decisions you make, which is what 'costs' represent. There are, however, some important ethical issues in deciding what costs to count, and how to count them. But these dilemmas are equally ...

At the turn of the XXI century, the emergence of new forms of work organization are transforming what had become standard forms of work arrangement in industrialized countries. In this new work environment, new firms, new types of workers and new risk factors are powerfully emerging. Contrary to common belief, we argue that emergent occupational health hazards should not be approached only as "...

Public agency managers certainly believe that the structures and rules that politicians provide influence their policy decisions. Many public administration scholars share that belief, but convincing empirical evidence is in short supply, partly because it is difficult to find agencies that make similar policy decisions, but are structured in different ways, creating the conditions for a “quasi...

Reinforcement learning algorithms that use eligibility traces, such as Sarsa(λ), have been empirically shown to be effective in learning good estimated-state-based policies in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Nevertheless, one can construct counterexamples, problems in which Sarsa(λ < 1 ) fails to find a good policy even though one exists. Despite this, these algorithms ...