BACKGROUND Mass media influence public acceptability, and hence feasibility, of public health interventions. This study investigates newsprint constructions of the alcohol problem and minimum unit pricing (MUP). METHODS Quantitative content analysis of 901 articles about MUP published in 10 UK and Scottish newspapers between 2005 and 2012. RESULTS MUP was a high-profile issue, particularly ...

We study a supply chain with one supplier and many retailers that face exogenous endcustomer demands. The supplier and the retailers all try to minimize their own inventory-related costs. In contrast to the retailers’ newsvendor type ordering behavior (under which retailers may place orders freely in every period), we propose two scheduled ordering policies: Scheduled Balanced Ordering Policy (...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the level of support among Western Australian adults for food control policies to improve diet, reduce obesity and protect the environment. METHODS Attitudes towards government food control policies on food labelling, food advertising, and the supply of environmentally friendly food data were pooled from two Nutrition Monitoring Survey Series telephone surveys of 2,14...

The potential interactions among fiscal policies, investments and economic growth are complex and manifold. In this paper, we will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the various economic insights that are currently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by a selective literature review) and empirically (by investigating available data from various countries). De...

The harmful effects of heavy drinking on health have been widely reported, yet public opinion on governmental responsibility for alcohol control remains divided. This study examines UK public attitudes towards alcohol policies, identifies underlying dimensions that inform these, and relationships with perceived effectiveness. A cross-sectional mixed methods study involving a telephone survey of...

While the social economy originated in Europe (Desroche, 1983; Gueslin, 1997; Vienney, 1994), by the nineteenth century it emerged in North America as well, particularly in Canada and Quebec with its ties to the United Kingdom and France as well as other European countries, especially Germany and Belgium. Today, it is interesting to explore the renewal of the social economy in Europe and in Can...

1. Introduction. Elaborating the fit between policy analysis and its subject: three features of political reality. Since Brian Fay (19750 argued for the social and political embeddedness of epistemology in policy analysis, the argument has been picked up by other policy scholars who have attempted to break down the conventional wall between science and social-political reasoning. Fay built upon...

We introduce a variant of the classification-based approach to policy iteration which uses a cost-sensitive loss function weighting each classification mistake by its actual regret, i.e., the difference between the action-value of the greedy action and of the action chosen by the classifier. For this algorithm, we provide a full finite-sample analysis. Our results state a performance bound in t...

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) form a rich class of stochastic search methods that use the Darwinian principles of variation and selection to incrementally improve a set of candidate solutions (Eiben and Smith, 2003; Jong, 2006). Both principles can be implemented from a wide variety of components and operators, many with parameters that need to be tuned if the EA is to perform as intended. Tuni...