Resources Repository
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ArticlePublication 2007Decision Analysis: A Personal Account of How It Got Started and Evolved
In this chapter, Howard Raiffa discusses the evolution of decision analysis and his personal involvement …
In this chapter, Howard Raiffa discusses the evolution of decision analysis and his personal involvement in its development. He describes the early days of Operations Research (OR) in the late 1940s with its approach to complex, strategic decision making. After reading John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947) and Abraham Wald’s two books (1947, 1950), he became involved in statistical decision theory. A few years later, after reading Leonard…
Preferences/Values | Probability/Bayes | Decision Theory | Decision Analysis | Operations Research | Business/Industry | Economics/Finance | Energy/Engineering | Health/Medicine -
ArticlePublication 2022Vaccinations versus Lockdowns to Prevent COVID-19 Mortality
This analysis estimated the costs associated with preventing Covid-19 deaths by vaccinations versus lockdowns. Publicly …
This analysis estimated the costs associated with preventing Covid-19 deaths by vaccinations versus lockdowns. Publicly available datasets from the Israeli Ministry of Health were used to model the parameters of the pandemic in Israel. The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker was used for quantitative data on government policies. Data on the Israeli economy were taken from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The models demonstrate that the first lockdown prevented 1022 COVID-19 deaths at the cost…
Decision Theory | Decision Analysis | Costing Methods | Health Outcomes | State-Transition | Infectious Diseases | Policy/Regulation | Economics/Finance | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | Middle East & North Africa -
ReportPublication 2017Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, …
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Preferences/Values | Decision Psychology | Social Determinants | Climate/Environment | Culture/Society | Energy/Engineering | Education/Labor | Health/Medicine | Science/Technology | North America -
GuidelinesPublication, Teaching Resource 2018Behavioral Economics Guide 2018
The 2018 Behavioral Economics Guide provides an introduction to behavioral economics, a review of developments …
The 2018 Behavioral Economics Guide provides an introduction to behavioral economics, a review of developments in the field, insights from practitioners, and general resources such as postgraduate programs and scholarly journals. This is the fifth edition of this now yearly publication. The 2018 edition features an introduction written by Robert Cialdini. Behavioraleconomics.com is the official home of the Behavioral Economics Guide. The guide is downloadable free of charge from the website.
Preferences/Values | Decision Psychology | Decision Theory | College | Graduate | Doctoral | Professional -
ArticlePublication 2016“Nudges” in Law and Policy
This article describes research on Americans’ preferences for types of “nudges” in the context of …
This article describes research on Americans’ preferences for types of “nudges” in the context of law and public policy—those that target “system 1” thinking, meaning the intuitive, emotion-based mechanisms, such as graphic warnings and default rules, versus those that target “system 2” thinking, the rational, deliberative form of cognition, such as statistical information or education-based messages.
Priority Setting/Ethics | Preferences/Values | Decision Psychology | Policy/Regulation | Culture/Society | Government/Law | Health/Medicine -
ArticlePublication 2015Broader Economic Impact of Vaccination: Reviewing and Appraising the Strength of Evidence
Economic evaluations of public health programs such as immunization often consider only direct health benefits and …
Economic evaluations of public health programs such as immunization often consider only direct health benefits and medical cost savings. Evidence linking immunization to important benefits in indicators such as childhood development, household behavior, and other macro-economic data are unclear. A conceptual framework of the pathways between immunization and these broader economic benefits was developed through expert consultation. The authors obtained articles from previous reviews, snowballing, and expert consultation, and associated them with one of the pathways and assessed them using modified Grading…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Preferences/Values | Costing Methods | Evidence Synthesis | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Infectious Diseases | Social Determinants | Economics/Finance | Education/Labor | Health/Medicine -
ReportPublication 2015Modeling to Improve Policy Decisions in the Americas: Noncommunicable Diseases
In the Region of the Americas, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are a clear threat not only …
In the Region of the Americas, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are a clear threat not only to human health, but also to a country’s economic development and growth. The evidence on both of these counts is compelling. In 2012, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers, chronic respiratory conditions including asthma, and other NCDs were the cause of 4.5 million deaths in the Americas. Of that total number, 1.5 million of them were premature, occurring among people aged 30-69…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Decision Analysis | Costing Methods | Mathematical Models | State-Transition | Microsimulation | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Mental Health | Health/Medicine | Latin America & Caribbean -
GuidelinesPublication 2014EPA Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses provide a framework for …
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses provide a framework for assessing the impacts of environmental regulations and policies that has been extensively peer-reviewed and is widely-applied both within and outside of the agency. The Guidelines discuss: (1) statutory and executive order requirements for conducting economic analyses; (2) identifying the need for policy action; (3) regulatory and non-regulatory approaches to pollution control; (4) baseline definition; (5) discounting future benefits and costs;…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Preferences/Values | Decision Analysis | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment | Government/Law | North America | Critical Thinking/Analysis -
ArticlePublication 2022Priority Setting in Early Childhood Development: An Analytical Framework
Early childhood development (ECD) sets the foundation for healthy and successful lives with important consequences …
Early childhood development (ECD) sets the foundation for healthy and successful lives with important consequences for education, labor market outcomes, and other domains of well-being. Even though many ECD interventions are implemented and evaluated globally, there is currently no standardized framework for comparing these interventions’ relative cost-effectiveness. The investigators developed an economic evaluation framework that focuses on the immediate impact of ECD interventions targeting motor, cognitive, language, and socioemotional skills. They applied the framework to compute…
Priority Setting/Ethics | Decision Analysis | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Child/Nutrition | Global