Over the past decades, a large body of research in fields such as knowledge utilization, evidencebased policy making, or epistemic communities, has been addressing the conditions under which expert advice can play a role in policy design. This research has been successful in exploring the complex role of expertise in the policy process and has produced a number of hypotheses relating to institu...

This study examines 2,933 cases of Japanese investment in 27 provinces and regions in China to identify the role that policy determinants had in influencing the sub-national location decision of Japanese firms in China. The empirical results show that the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Opening Coastal Cities (OCCs) were a successful policy instrument initially, as SEZs and OCCs had a strong ...

BACKGROUND Policy-making is a dynamic process involving the interplay of various factors. Power and its role are some of its core components. Though power exerts a profound role in policy-making, empirical evidence suggests that health policy analysis has paid only limited attention to the role of power, particularly in policy dialogues. METHODS This exploratory study, which used qualitative ...

We consider an active information system, which aims to notify a traveler timely about a likely delay. Besides providing the right content, it should also wait for the best time for notification. This is especially true for mobile information services, where every notification may irritate the recipient. We formulate and solve such a problem involving best choices both for content and time of n...

In this paper we present a new class of complexity measures, induced by a new data structure for representing k-valued functions (operations), called minor decision diagram. The results are presented in terms of MultiValued Logic circuits (MVL-circuits), ordered decision diagrams, formulas and minor decomposition trees. When assigning values to some variables in a function f the resulting funct...

This paper is about reducing influence dia­ gram (ID) evaluation into Bayesian network (BN) inference problems. Such reduction is interesting because it enables one to read­ ily use one's favorite BN inference algorithm to efficiently evaluate IDs. Two such reduc­ tion methods have been proposed previously (Cooper 1988, Shachter and Peot 1992). This paper proposes a new method. The BN in­ feren...

This study examines some of the important organizational consequences of the fashion phenomenon in information technology. An IT fashion is an information technology transitorily collectively believed as new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual corporate IT budgets, I have found that companies associated with IT fashions did not ...

We discuss the phenomenon of system tailoring in the context of data from an observational study of anaesthesia. We found that anaesthetists tailor their monitoring equipment so that the auditory alarms are more informative. However, the occurrence of tailoring by anaesthetists in the operating theatre was infrequent, even though the flexibility to tailor exists on many of the patient monitorin...

London Plan is the London mayor’s Spatial Development Strategy. This strategic long-term plan comprises of proposals for different aspects of change within the London boundary. Furthermore, the proposals include chapters outlining adjustments in each facet. Policy 4A.2 reflects the Climate Change Mitigation scheme. Some consultations and research works have been performed to this point, but an ...

This study reports an intensive, exploratory study of a single, protracted conflictual interaction involving all four members of a family. Within the larger interaction, there were four subinteractions. Because of space limitations, only the central conflictual subinteraction will be described. This interaction involved three of the four family members: the father and two daughters. The two chi...