Increasing accessibility and affordability of healthcare services has been considered as an important policy objective since the beginning of 1980s in Iran. However, current 60- 70% health care out-of-pocket payments create a barrier to an equal access to quality health services, especially in terms of new medicines which affects equity issues and "health" in Iran. Currently, health insurance o...

In a complex and extended system such as a government, the proper allocation of the budget to its sub-entities is always a major challenge. As such for cases like governments, a situation in which multiple budget sources with different concerns available to the sub-entities is common. This study develops an applicable model for large-scale cases in which identifying the flow of capital or budge...

It has become increasingly popular to obtain machine learning labels through commercial crowdsourcing services. The crowdsourcing workers or annotators are paid for each label they provide, but the task requester usually has only a limited amount of the budget. Since the data instances have different levels of labeling difficulty and the workers have different reliability for the labeling task,...

A managed-care company must decide on allocating resources of many services to many groups of enrollees. The profit-maximizing allocation rule is characterized. For each group, the marginal utilities across all services are equalized. The equilibrium has an enrollee group shadow price interpretation. The equilibrium spending allocation can be implemented by letting utilitarian physicians decide...

Average population density has been a traditional urban sprawl indicator, but it is insufficient to encapsulate its detrimental impacts. We demonstrate that cities of identical average may be subject very different levels car dependency, CO2 emissions and public budget deficits. To capture this, we shed light into the properties two “density-allocation” indicators: percentage land in which fall...

Mobile/spatial crowdsourcing is a class of crowdsourcing applications in which workers travel to specific locations in order to perform tasks. As workers may possess different levels of competence, a major research challenge for spatial crowdsourcing is to control the quality of the results obtained. Although existing mobile crowdsourcing systems are able to track a wide range of performance re...

The dynamics of infectious diseases spread is crucial in determining their risk and offering ways to contain them. We study sequential vaccination of individuals in networks. In the original (deterministic) version of the Firefighter problem, a fire breaks out at some node of a given graph. At each time step, b nodes can be protected by a firefighter and then the fire spreads to all unprotected...

We study the value of component commonality in a periodic review assemble-to-order system, introduced by Akçay and Xu in 2004, where an independent base stock policy and a first-come-first-served allocation rule are used, and the base stock levels and the component allocation are optimized jointly. We show that lowering component commonality may yield a higher type-II service level. The lower d...

The paving of the way for a new climate agreement has turned out to be extremely challenging. The negotiators struggle to make the required emissions reductions binding under international law and to agree on burden-sharing amongst nations. Despite the fact that the G8 (Major Economics Forum 2009 ) as well as the Copenhagen Accord (UNFCCC 2010 ) refer to the 2°C target, the current pledges of t...

Commercial plant breeders improve economically important traits by selectively mating individuals from a given breeding population. Potential pairings are evaluated before the growing season using Monte Carlo simulation, and a mating design is created to allocate a fixed breeding budget across the parent pairs to achieve desired population outcomes. We introduce a novel objective function for t...