it is essential to consider policy assessment in policy cycle. however, ex-ante evaluation has been rarely reviewed in the policy evaluation literature. in the article, a five-phase process of ex-ante evaluation of science and technology policies in policy cycle using grounded theory is offered. for this purpose, through literature review, ten keywords were searched and finally, having chosen 5...

In this paper we describe a framework in which concepts are related to targets of navigation tasks. Concepts are represented by policies, that are improved based on evaluations of a human teacher. Eventually, when the task can be completed, actions with high expected rewards indicate which observation show the ‘concept’. In an experiment we show that the robot is capable of selecting observatio...

This article develops a framework for environmental policy analysis based on an encompassing assessment of transaction costs. This approach emphasizes the ex ante costs of establishing environmental entitlements, and the ex post costs of administrating, monitoring, and enforcing them. The framework is used to organize a literature review which addresses policy design and instrument choice, as w...

The author develops the basic idea of evaluation policy, describes a practical model for development and revision of evaluation policies (including a taxonomy, structure, and set of principles), and suggests critical challenges and opportunities for the future of evaluation policy. An evaluation policy is any rule or principle that a group or organization uses to guide its decisions and actions...

Prior to the 2010 health care reforms, scholars often commented that health policy making in Congress was mired in political gridlock, that reforms were far more likely to fail than to succeed, and that the path forward was unclear. In light of recent events, new narratives are being advanced. In formulating these assessments, scholars of health politics tend to analyze individual major reform ...

Policy Evaluation and Economic Policy Advice Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific interest typically exert some influence on their treatment stat...

Eligibility traces have been shown to speed reinforcement learning, to make it more robust to hidden states, and to provide a link between Monte Carlo and temporal-difference methods. Here we generalize eligibility traces to off-policy learning, in which one learns about a policy different from the policy that generates the data. Off-policy methods can greatly multiply learning, as many policie...