Doing Good with Good OR: Supporting Cost-Effective Hepatitis B Interventions

Introduction to the Special Issue on Humanitarian Applications: Doing Good with Good OR

Humanitarian applications include research that is primarily directed toward promoting human welfare. For example, humanity’s top 10 problems over the next 50 years have been outlined as the following: energy, water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism, disease, education, democracy, and population. Likewise, research focused on planning and responding to disasters can have an immediate impac...

Doing Good with Spam Is Hard

We study economic means to improve network performance in the well-known game theoretic traffic model due to Wardrop. We introduce two sorts of spam flow auxiliary and adversarial flow that have no intrinsic value. Auxiliary/adversarial flows are a separate commodity with the sole objective to minimize/maximize the latency at the induced Wardrop equilibrium of the selfish flow. By this means a ...

Doing Good, Being Good, and the Social Construction of Compassion

Competition in Healthcare: Good, Bad or Ugly?

The role of competition in healthcare is much debated. Despite a wealth of international experience in relation to competition, evidence is mixed and contested and the debate about the potential role for competition is often polarised. This paper considers briefly some of the reasons for this, focusing on what is meant by “competition in healthcare” and why it is more valuable to think about th...

Tainted altruism: when doing some good is evaluated as worse than doing no good at all.

In four experiments, we found that the presence of self-interest in the charitable domain was seen as tainting: People evaluated efforts that realized both charitable and personal benefits as worse than analogous behaviors that produced no charitable benefit. This tainted-altruism effect was observed in a variety of contexts and extended to both moral evaluations of other agents and participant...