Scientific progress is a significant basis for change in public-health policy and practice, but the field also invests in value-laden concepts and responds daily to sociopolitical, cultural and evaluative concerns. The concepts that drive much of public-health practice are shaped by the collective and individual mores that define social systems. This paper seeks to describe the ethics processes...

People are often expected to make decisions based on all of the relevant information, weighted and combined appropriately. Under many conditions, however, people use heuristic strategies that depart from this ideal. I tested the ability of two models to predict bail decisions made by judges in two courts. In both courts, a simple heuristic proved to be a better predictor of judicial decisions t...

The funding of scientific research is almost always justified in terms of the potential for achieving beneficial societal outcomes. In pursuing a particular societal outcome, how can we know if one research portfolio is better than another? In this paper we conceptualize: (1) science in terms of a ‘‘supply’’ of knowledge and information, (2) societal outcomes in terms of a ‘‘demand’’ function t...

The Navy’s promotion-retention process involves two successive decisions: The Navy decides whether an individual is selected for promotion, and then, conditional on the Navy’s decision, the sailor decides whether to reenlist or leave the Navy. Rates of promotion and retention depend on individuals’ demographic and other characteristics, wars and economic conditions and factors that the Navy ...

background although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in low-income countries (lics), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. we aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...