Access to electric power is critical to societal welfare. In this paper, we analyze the interaction between a defender and a terrorist who threatens the operation of an electric power system. The defender wants to find a strategic defense to minimize the consequences of an attack. Both parties have limited budgets and behave in their own self-interest. The problem is formulated as a multi-level...

In April 1999 major changes will start to take place in the organisation and delivery of health services in England. 2 For general practitioners, the most important changes will be the formation of primary care groups and the implementation of unified, cash limited budgets for health services. How will current methods of allocating NHS budgets in England change, and what can be learnt from expe...

Although federal regulation of health care faces cultural obstacles and skepticism among policymakers, it has grown markedly over the past two decades. Beginning in the 1970s with decentralized programs aimed at regulating provider behavior (Health Systems Agencies and certificate of need) and budgets (state rate setting), health care regulation grew more centralized in the 1980s as federal pol...

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms can encounter difficulties when solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the outcomes of actions are highly stochastic. This stochastic branching can be reduced through state abstraction. In online planning with a time budget, there is a complex tradeoff between loss in performance due to overly coarse abstraction versus gain in performance fro...

We present an efficiency model for data warehouse operations and analyze a data set to evaluate the model. The model contains salient variables to evaluate the efficiency of an organization’s data warehouse operations for refresh processing and query production. The variables in the model include resource consumption (labor usage and computing budgets), system usage measures (users and queries)...

Why do foreign aid budgets vary across countries and over time? Existing research indicates that the same set of factors shapes commitments toward both domestic and international redistribution. While scholars have acknowledged international normative influences on aid allocations, research on levels of donor generosity has not examined how international trade influences aid budgets. This paper...

The availability of medical providers, a crucial element in quality of care, depends not only on budgeting for and filling posts but also on ensuring that providers are not frequently absent. We present data from a nationally representative all-India survey (conducted in 2003) of over 1400 public health centers across 19 major states, in which survey enumerators physically verify the attendance...