This paper relates a series of current development in the literature of economics and psychology as they relate to decision making by households and business firms. The first part of the paper reviews recent literature dealing with happiness and subjective wellbeing. In the second part of the paper recent developments in management science that make use of intuition and mental focus are related...

OBJECTIVES Several studies have shown that a key determinant of successful health technology assessment (HTA) uptake is a clear, fair, and consistent decision-making process for the approval and introduction of health technologies. The aim of this study was to gauge healthcare providers' and managers' perceptions of local level decision making and determine whether these processes offer a condu...

Recently, there have been calls among decision makers, interest groups, citizens, and scientists alike for more science-based environmental policy. The assumption is that including scientists and scientific information will improve the quality of complex policy decisions. Others have argued, however, that science and scientists are just one source of expertise concerning natural resource manage...

Background The inclusion of cost-effectiveness data, as a basis for priority setting rankings, is a distinguishing feature in the formulation of the Swedish national guidelines. Guidelines are generated with the direct intent to influence health policy and support decisions about the efficient allocation of scarce healthcare resources. Certain medical conditions may be given higher priority ran...

Background Higher education programmes preparing health system managers for their jobs seldom include supply chain management (SCM) in the curriculum. However, SCM knowledge and skills are necessary not only for health workers, but also for managers and policy makers. Indeed, SCM awareness at decision-making level is essential to facilitate the establishment of policy frameworks giving SCM a pl...

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), as a system of allocative efficiency for global health programs, is an influential criterion for resource allocation in the context of diplomacy and inherent foreign policy decisions therein. This is because such programs have diplomatic benefits and costs that can be uploaded from the recipient and affect the broader foreign policy interests of the donor and ...

I describe a model of strategic communication within groups in policy-making situations with decentralized policy-making authority. I show that, in a cheap-talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of signaling between agents and, accordingly, both the quality of individual policy decisions and social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents c...

Operations research (OR) focuses on the application of analytical methods to facilitate better decision-making. Despite its usefulness and proliferation of papers in the academic literature, there are still major issues around getting OR models widely accepted and used as part of mainstream decision-making by clinicians, health managers and policy-makers. This article aims to raise the awarenes...

With demand for health services continuing to grow as populations age and new technologies emerge to meet health needs, healthcare policy-makers are under constant pressure to set priorities, ie, to make choices about the health services that can and cannot be funded within available resources. In a recent paper, Smith et al apply an influential policy studies framework – Kingdon’s multiple str...

The healthcare context is characterized with new developments, technologies, ideas and expectations that are continually reshaping the frontline of care delivery. Mannion and Exworthy identify two key factors driving this complexity, ‘standardization’ and ‘customization,’ and their apparent resulting paradox to be negotiated by healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers. However, whil...