In places where the competing health plans are unlikely to ever emerge, any policy predicated on assumptions that competing plans will deliver health insurance benefits needs to have a "fallback" option that is guaranteed to work.

The HHRAA Project and its SARA component are charged with presenting Africa-relevant research findings and information to policy makers in a format and manner that will assist them in making "optimal strategy, policy or program choices." Accordingly, we felt it was essential to analyze what is known about how information is used and how policy is formulated. This paper, prepared for SARA by Rob...

In this paper the investment and liquidation policy of a levered firm is analyzed. The possibility of renegotiating the original debt contract is included. It is shown that the shareholders’ option to restructure the outstanding debt exacerbates Myers’ (1977) underinvestment problem. This result is due to a higher wealth transfer from the shareholders to the creditors occurring upon investment ...

Using a new dataset of currency option prices, we study the evolution of investor confidence in 1992-1998 over the chance of individual currencies to converge to the Euro. Convergence risk, which may reflect uncertainty over policy commitment as well as exogenous fundamentals, induces a level of implied volatility in excess of actual volatility (volatility wedge). We show formally that confiden...

Growing concerns about climate change and energy security have led to a strong focus on energy efficiency within UK energy policy. At the same time, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become pervasive in society and this has brought with it new policy options which use them as enabling technologies. One such policy option planned for implementation in the UK is the use of sm...

Background: Villagization scheme was chosen as a policy option and implemented to ensure sustainable food security in Assosa zone, Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia, although it is blamed for intensifying food insecurity instead. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the food security status of households gathered in planned villages in the framework of villagization. Methods: This cro...

This paper presents an analytic procedure for the value added to different production levels with different policy options. The approach is stochastic and thus provides a framework for informed decision-making on productivity growth under uncertainty conditions. The model was applied to data collected from a firm and re-sults recommend that the firm should redevelop if in diversification and sy...

BACKGROUND Nearly a quarter of a million children have acquired HIV, prompting the implementation of new protocols-Option B and B+-for treating HIV+ pregnant women. While efficacy has been demonstrated in randomized trials, there is limited real-world evidence on the impact of these changes. Using longitudinal, routinely collected data we assessed the impact of the adoption of WHO Option B in R...

We consider the reuse of policies for previous MDPs in learning on a new MDP, under the assumption that the vector of parameters of each MDP is drawn from a xed probability distribution. We use the options framework, in which an option consists of a set of initiation states, a policy, and a termination condition. We use an option called a reuse option, for which the set of initiation states is ...

Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy for a Markov Decision Process (MDP). For complex, high-dimensional MDPs, it may only be feasible to represent the policy with function approximation. If the policy representation used cannot represent good policies, the problem is misspecified and the learned policy may be far from optimal. We introduce IHOMP as an approach for solving...