A long standing question related to immunization financing and sustainability has been whether the existence of a specific line item for vaccines purchasing within the national health budget can contribute significantly to increasing national government financing of vaccines and routine immunizations. Based on immunization financing indicators from 185 countries collected through the joint WHO ...

The theory of compensatory consumption suggests that a possible lack of traditional avenues for fulfilling needs for social status may lead ethnic minorities to shift measures of social status from traditional indicators such as occupational prestige to consumption indicators of status conveying goods. In this study we investigate whether a household’s ethnic identity affects its budget allocat...

Customer Relationship Management generally uses the value of customers to allocate marketing budget. But marketing interventions generally change the customer behavior, turning upside-down the customers ranking based on their initial valuations and making the budget allocation suboptimal. Rational Managers should allocate the marketing budget to maximize the expected net present value of future...

We consider the problem of efficient mechanism design for multilateral trading of multiple goods with independent private types for players and incomplete information among them. The problem is partly motivated by an efficient resource allocation problem in communication networks where there are both buyers and sellers. In such a setting, ex post budget balance and individual rationality are ke...

All societies face the need to make judgments about what interventions (both public health and personal medical) to provide to their populations under reasonable resource constraints. Their decisions should be informed by good evidence and arguments from health technology assessment (HTA). But if HTA restricts itself to evaluations of safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness, it risks being vie...

We consider online stratified sampling for Monte Carlo estimation of the integral of a function given a finite budget n of noisy evaluations to the function. In this paper we address the problem of choosing the best number K of strata as a function of n. A large K provides a high quality stratification where an accurate estimate of the integral of f could be computed by an optimal oracle alloca...

Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA [email protected] [email protected] Abstract We present a simulation run allocation scheme for improving efficiency in simulation experiments for decision making under uncertainty. This scheme is called Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA). OCBA advances the state-of-the-art by intelligently ...

In energetic terms, fitness may be seen to be dependent on successful allocation of energy between life-history traits. In addition, fitness will be constrained by the energy allocation ability, which has also been defined as condition. We suggest here that the allocation ability, estimated as the difference between total energy budget and maintenance metabolism, may be used as a measure of con...