We present a prototype of a decision sup­ port system for management of the fungal disease powdery mildew in winter wheat. The prototype is based on an influence di­ agram which is used to determine the op­ timal time and dose of mildew treatments. This involves multiple decision opportunities over time, stochasticity, inaccurate informa­ tion and incomplete knowledge. The paper describes the p...

Second-order calculations may significantly increase a decision maker’s understanding of a decision situation when handling aggregations of imprecise representations, as is the case in decision trees or influence diagrams, while the use of only first-order results gives an incomplete picture. The results apply also to approaches which do not explicitly deal with second-order distributions, inst...

Motivated by applications in retail, online advertising, and cultural markets, this paper studies how to find the optimal assortment and positioning of products subject to a capacity constraint and social influence. We prove that the optimal assortment and positioning can be found in polynomial time for a multinomial logit model capturing utilities, position bias, and social influence. Moreover...

Interest groups struggle to build reputations as influential actors in the policy process and to discern the influence exercised by others. This study conceptualizes influence reputation as a relational variable that varies locally throughout a network. Drawing upon interviews with 168 interest group representatives in the United States health policy domain, this research examines the effects o...

Campaign finance contributions may influence policy by affecting elections or by influencing the choices of politicians once in office. We study the trade-offs between these two paths to influence using a game in which contributions may affect electoral outcomes and signal policy-relevant information to politicians. In the model, an interest group and two politicians each possess private inform...

background in recent times, there has been a growing demand internationally for health policies to be based on reliable research evidence. consequently, there is a need to strengthen institutions and mechanisms that can promote interactions among researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders who can influence the uptake of research findings. the health policy advisory committee (hpac) is on...

Background There is need to strengthen institutions and mechanisms that can more systematically promote interactions between researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders who can influence the uptake of research findings. In this article, we report the outcome of a two-way secondment model between Ebonyi State University (EBSU) and Ebonyi State Ministry of Health (ESMoH) in Nigeria as an in...

Fiscal policy is a policy that tries to achieve certain economic goals through instruments such as changes in government expenditure and taxation. The financial policy uses two instruments of government revenue (tax) and government spending (spending) to influence the economy. And in the economic literature, they consider economic growth to be equal to GDP. The impact of financial policies on e...