Despite the mixed results of Brown and colleagues' review of the evidence for the use of performance indicators in health policy, this paper argues that they have an important place. Healthcare organizations cannot rely on altruism alone to motivate improved performance. Berwick, supporting the use of performance indicators in healthcare, argues "threats to survival are necessary to build will ...

In a recent article, Mannion and Davies argue that there are a multitude of ways in which organizations (such as the National Health Service [NHS]) can deal with wrongdoing or ethical problems, including the formation of policies that encourage and protect would-be whistleblowers. However, it is important to distinguish internal reporting about wrongdoing from whistleblowing proper, because the...

In recent years calls for evidence-based practice are being made emphatically in the nursing literature worldwide. Yet, the underlying construct, which relates to use of scientifically-based knowledge and research to practice, has been with us for a long time. This analytic paper provides an overview of research utilization models developed and used in nursing and other fields, highlighting som...

We aim to integrate information, monitoring and enforcement costs into the choice of environmental policy instruments. We use a static partial equilibrium framework to study different combinations of regulatory instruments (taxes, standards...) and enforcement instruments (criminal fine, administrative fine...). The firms’ compliance decisions depend on the instrument combination selected by th...

Economics has looked at the decision process of politicians but the decision process of agency staff has primarily been the purview of sociologists. Agencies affect the final form of regulations, they may enforce or ignore regulations that exist, and they provide information to the political process. Policies recommended by economists for nonpoint source pollution control are seldom supported b...

In this paper we describe our approach to a policy management system and a policy enforcement point which is integrated into the Globus Toolkit middleware. Our system enables the specification and modification of resource policies by administrative parties through a graphical user interface and the secure association with and transport of these policies to the policy decision components.

Economists providing policy advice often justify recommendations of government non-interference in the allocation of resources between production sectors and free trade with reference to the Diamond and Mirrlees efficiency theorem. However, such policy advice may be misleading when, as is in general the case, administrative costs effectively restrict the set of feasible tax instruments availabl...

Internetworks that are global in scale, contain multiple administrative domains, and support a range of services present special requirements for routing. Multiple administrative domains introduce the need for policy-sensitive routing. Service heterogeneity intensifies the requirement for type of service (TOS) routing, as well as other protocol support for handling a range of services, from dat...

In this paper, we propose a framework to administrate privacy policies in distributed service infrastructure. We define new administrative capabilities that model user preferences and specify how data owners can access to them. We investigate a distributed administration of the privacy policy where three different administrative policies can coexist and one can dominate the other. We define the...

Relationship-based access control (ReBAC) originated in the context of social network systems and recently is being generalized to be suitable for general computing systems. This paper defines a ReBAC model, based on Crampton and Sellwood’s RPPM model, designed to be suitable for general computing systems. Our ReBAC model includes a comprehensive administrative model. The administrative model i...