Given the focus on health systems in the post-millennium development goal era and moving towards the sustainable development goals, there is a compelling need for a common framework for health policy and systems research ethics to guide researchers and facilitate review by research ethics committees. A consultation of global health policy and systems research and ethics experts was convened to ...

Rationing is an inventory policy that allows prioritization for different demand classes. This prioritization results in a different service level for each demand class. The mechanism through which the rationing policy is implemented is to stop serving lower priority classes when the inventory on hand drops below a certain critical level. Under this level, only higher priority classes are serve...

This article reviews the empirical evidence that suggests that there is a solid foundation for more systematic research attention to the ways in which interventions that seek to reduce the multiple dimensions of racism can improve health and reduce disparities in health. First, research reveals that policies and procedures that seek to reduce institutional racism by improving neighborhood and e...

Dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to address problems from a variety of fields, including automatic control, artificial intelligence, operations research, and economy. Many problems in these fields are described by continuous variables, whereas DP and RL can find exact solutions only in the discrete case. Therefore, approximation is essential in practical DP a...

Policy search is a method for approximately solving an optimal control problem by performing a parametric optimization search in a given class of parameterized policies. In order to process a local optimization technique, such as a gradient method, we wish to evaluate the sensitivity of the performance measure with respect to the policy parameters, the so-called policy gradient. This paper is c...

In this paper we consider a stochastic-demand periodic-review inventory model with sudden obsolescence. We characterize the structure of the optimal policy and propose a dynamic programming algorithm for computing its parameters. We then utilize this algorithm to approximate the solution to the continuous-review sudden obsolescence problem with general obsolescence distribution. We prove conver...

This paper is a contribution to the methodological work of the ESRC UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice, and part of an attempt to broaden the applications and techniques of systematic review. It takes the form of an embryonic review of public disclosure, a policy better known as 'naming and shaming'. Six initiatives are examined in order to develop an elementary theory of the cond...

We consider component allocation in Assemble-to-Order production–inventory systems. We prove that asymptotic optimality on the diffusion scale can be achieved under a continuous-review policy. We also show that in many systems, meeting this optimality criterion requires component reservation.