Background This paper investigates whether state legislators find testimony influential, to what extent testimony influences policy-makers’ decisions, and defines the features of testimony important in affecting policy-makers’ decisions.   Methods We used a mixed method approach to analyze responses from 862 state-level legislators in the United States (U.S.). Data were collected via a phone su...

Understanding the policy cycle, as well as scrutinizing the text of hidden and obvious policies and rules, requires a model of discourse analysis based on which discursive ap-proaches of policy makers are understood and estimated. However, when it comes to presenting a policy model, we have to use the views of policy theorists to see how a problem as a "public goods" can be found in the policy ...

RAND Europe is an independent, not-for-profit policy research organisation that aims to improve policy and decisionmaking in the public interest through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. The European Platform for Investing in Children (EPIC) was set up to explore demographic and economic challenges in the EU ...

This dissertation explores and analyses the challenges and needs that developments in the information society are bringing to knowledge production supporting policy development and strategic decision making in the field of transport. Currently, the context of transport policies is about to shift from a transport infrastructure network design towards the development of a large socio-technical sy...

The recent financial crisis has led many to question how well businesses deliver services and how well regulatory institutions address problems in consumer financial markets. This paper discusses consumer financial regulation, emphasizing the full range of arguments for regulation that derive from market failure and from limited consumer rationality in financial decision making. We present thre...

OBJECTIVES Develop a website, the OLC, which supports those people who work on promoting a healthy weight and tackling obesity. Research shows that original networks where sharing of information and peer interaction take place create solutions to current public health challenges. METHODS Considerations that are relevant when building a new information service as well as the technical set up a...

RAND Europe is an independent, not-for-profit policy research organisation that aims to improve policy and decisionmaking in the public interest through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. The European Platform for Investing in Children (EPIC) was set up to explore demographic and economic challenges in the EU ...

Businesses are increasingly interested in how big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics can be used to increase revenue, lower costs, and improve their business processes. In this paper, we describe how we have developed a data-driven machine learning method to optimize the collection process for a debt collection agency. Precisely speaking, we create a frame...

Markovian processes have long been used to model stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning has emerged as a framework to solve sequential planning and decision making problems in such environments. In recent years, attempts were made to apply methods from reinforcement learning to construct adaptive treatment strategies, where a sequence of individualized treatments is learned from clinic...