This article is part of a series written for people responsible for making decisions about health policies and programmes and for those who support these decision makers. The term monitoring is commonly used to describe the process of systematically collecting data to inform policymakers, managers and other stakeholders whether a new policy or programme is being implemented in accordance with t...

This paper explains how scientific data can be incorporated into urban design decisions, such as evaluating contextual design principles. The recommended protocols are based on the Cochrane Reviews that have been widely used in medical research. The major concepts of a Cochrane Review are explained, as well as the underlying mathematics. The underlying math is meta-analysis. Data are reported f...

The term governance is used more and more often in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of public policies. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to shed light on its meaning, and to study its applicability for the study of recent public health policies in Latin America. After discussing the differences between governance and the close concepts of management, governability and govern...

This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, although politicians, because of deterministic voting, can win an election with certainty by making concessions to vote...

All decisions, whether they are personal, public, or business-related, are based on the decision maker's beliefs and values. Science can and should help decision makers by shaping their beliefs. Unfortunately, science is not easily accessible to decision makers, and scientists often do not understand decision makers' information needs. This article presents a framework for bridging the gap betw...

In the modern world, government policy makers engage in the decision making process to pursue the interests of their countries. Think tanks play a significant role in this complicated process by giving advice to decision makers. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, think tanks increasingly emerged in the world, especially in Western European countries and the United States of America (...

The sensitivity analysis for multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problems is important for two reasons: First, the decision matrix as the source of the results of a decision problem is inaccurate because it sorts the alternatives in each criterion inaccurately. Second, the decision maker may change his opinions in a time period because of changes in the importance of the criteria and in the ...

the field of cognitive psychology has increasingly provided scientific insights to explore how humans are subject to unconscious sources of evidentiary bias, leading to errors that can affect judgement and decision-making. increasingly these insights are being applied outside the realm of individual decision-making to the collective arena of policy-making as well. a recent editorial in this jou...

If, according to Gaetano Mosca, the Italian social thinker, we define elites as individuals and groups, that, as a result of the power they gain, they plan idea and, as a result of that, make decisions that are effective in the community action; thus, at the macro and national levels, the elites and experts of each country are considered as the most important and valuable treasure of the countr...