Priority setting: learning to make tough decisions

Tough times call for tough decisions.

Priority Setting: Right Answer to a Far Too Narrow Question?; Comment on “Global Developments in Priority Setting in Health”

In their recent editorial, Baltussen and colleagues provide a concise summary of the prevailing discourse on priority-setting in health policy. Their perspective is entirely consistent with current practice, yet they unintentionally demonstrate the narrowness and moral precariousness of that discourse and practice. I respond with demonstrations of the importance of ‘interrogating scarcity’ in a...

Learning to Make Rent-to-Buy Decisions with Systems Applications

In the single rent-to-buy decision problem, without a priori knowledge of the amount of time a resource will be used we need to decide when to buy the resource, given that we can rent the resource for $1 per unit time or buy it once and for all for $c. In this paper we study algorithms that make a sequence of single rent-to-buy decisions, using the assumption that the resource use times are ind...

Learning to Make Collective Decisions: The Impact of Confidence Escalation

Little is known about how people learn to take into account others' opinions in joint decisions. To address this question, we combined computational and empirical approaches. Human dyads made individual and joint visual perceptual decision and rated their confidence in those decisions (data previously published). We trained a reinforcement (temporal difference) learning agent to get the partici...

Using machine learning to make constraint solver implementation decisions

Programs to solve so-called constraint problems are complex pieces of software which require many design decisions to be made more or less arbitrarily by the implementer. These decisions affect the performance of the finished solver significantly [13]. Once a design decision has been made, it cannot easily be reversed, although a different decision may be more appropriate for a particular probl...