or practice selecting a portfolio of environmental programs for a synthetic fuels facility this article describes how a u s department of energy steering committee used a decision analysis procedure to develop a portfolio of environmental and health research programs for a commercial scale synthetic fuels facility the procedure used information and insights from decision analyses conducted in five technical areas to support decision analysis at the portfolio level the problem was complex because it included many combinations of studies that could be funded multiple objectives in the five technical areas as well as at the portfolio level and uncertainties about research needs the availability of technical data and research costs the article discusses the rationale for using formal decision analysis the main features of the procedure and how the procedure provided the steering committee with a logical basis for evaluating a large number of diverse technical projects and with the help of health and environmental experts established research priorities and budget allocations in a logical and defensible manner

baseline value specification and sensitivity analysis in multiattribute project portfolio selection abstract a key issue in applying multi attribute project portfolio models is specifying the baseline value a parameter which defines how valuable not implementing a project is relative to the range of possible project values in this paper we present novel baseline value specification techniques which admit incomplete preference statements and unlike existing techniques make it possible to model problems where the decision maker would prefer to implement a project with the least preferred performance level in each attribute furthermore we develop computational methods for identifying the optimal portfolios and the value to cost based project rankings for all baseline values we also show how these results can be used to i analyze how sensitive project and portfolio decision recommendations are to variations in the baseline value and ii provide project decision recommendations in a situation where only incomplete information about the baseline value is available

international portfolio choice and political instability risk a multi objective approach abstract the benefits derived from international portfolio diversification into foreign nations including the less developed countries are well documented yet this practice is discouraged due to market imperfections such as political instability in practice nations may be differentiated further by many aspects such as border controls or political and social trends which constrain private transactions and financial decisions this paper attempts to examine 1 whether the home asset bias in a portfolio holding is associated with higher political instability risk and 2 to what extent international diversification among stocks in the presence of such risk outperforms domestic stock portfolios using alternative instability risk proxies in the context of a discrete time version of mean variance framework we corroborate the impact of this type of risk on international portfolio investment decisions

testing the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market under the assumption of no risk premium the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float is examined more extensively than previously semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a predictor are considered in addition to the standard weak form test these stronger tests reject the joint null hypothesis of an efficient exchange market and no risk premium for the period ending in october 1976 although not for the entire period for almost every year the current spot rate provided a better forecast of the future spot rate than did the current forward rate there is now an extensive empirical literature on testing the efficiency of various foreign exchange markets see 16 for a survey yet almost all of these tests are weak form tests or tests of the bias of the forward exchange rate as a predictor of the future spot rate such tests in the canadian u s exchange market can be found in the work of porter 20 eastman 5 kaserman 10 kohihagen 11 cornell 3 and levich 14 for the canadian float of the 1950s porter 20 and kaserman 10 found that one could not reject the unbiasedness of the forward rate eastman 5 and kohlhagen 11 rejected the unbiasedness of the forward rate for the floating period although not for the subsequent fixed period but their use of overlapping contracts means that their standard errors are biased cornell 3 and levich 14 found that in terms of the root meansquared error criterion the lagged spot rate and the lagged forward rate predicted the current spot rate equally well for more recent periods this paper examines the efficiency of the canadian u s exchange market for the current float july 1970 to december 1978 in a more extensive way than it has been previously examined from the weak form test the paper proceeds to two semi strong form tests which admit the lagged spot rate as a possible predictor throughout the paper various subperiods are considered in addition to the period as a whole

bayesian portfolio selection with multi variate random variance models we consider multi period portfolio selection problems for a decision maker with a specified utility function when the variance of security returns is described by a discrete time stochastic model the solution of these problems involves a dynamic programming formulation and backward induction we present a simulation based method to solve these problems adopting an approach which replaces the preposterior analysis by a surface fitting based optimization approach we provide examples to illustrate the implementation of our approach

portfolio optimization with stochastic dominance constraints abstract we consider the problem of constructing a portfolio of finitely many assets whose return rates are described by a discrete joint distribution we propose a new portfolio optimization model involving stochastic dominance constraints on the portfolio return rate we develop optimality and duality theory for these models we construct equivalent optimization models with utility functions numerical illustration is provided

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

in search of the exchange risk premium a six currency test assuming mean variance optimization abstract a number of authors examining deviations of actual rates of currency depreciation from forward discounts have claimed to find evidence of risk premiums if these deviations are indeed partly due to risk premiums rather than being entirely due to expectational errors then they should be systematically related to those variables on which risk premiums are thought to depend finance theory tells us that if investors optimize with respect to mean and variance the risk premium depends in a specific way on 1 the supplies of assets denominated in the various currencies 2 the variance covariance matrix of the rates of return and 3 the coefficient of risk aversion the null hypothesis of this paper is that the coefficient of risk aversion is zero countries assets are perfect substitutes and risk premiums are nonexistent the alternative hypothesis is that rates of return are systematically related to asset supplies by a macroeconomic portfolio balance function the maximum likelihood technique used dominates previous attempts to find such a relationship in that the parameters of the portfolio balance function are constrained to depend on the variance covariance matrix as the finance theory says they should on the other hand the technique also dominates previous applications of the finance theory in that the expected returns are allowed to vary over time as the macroeconomic portfolio balance theory says they should the paper s finding is a statistical inability to reject the null hypothesis for a portfolio of six currencies although this could be due to low power in the test

variable base budgeting for r d an issue of theoretical and practical importance to r d managers is the proper allocation of an organization s resources between the periodic selection and budgeting of r d projects and the implementation of these projects one possibility is to consider previous allocations as an established base and to restrict the attention of r d managers to an examination of any subsequent deviations from the base the advantage of this strategy often called incremental budgeting is that it focuses managerial and analytical efforts on a few current decisions a second possibility called zero base budgeting is to ignore previous allocations and to reexamine all feasible alternatives at the start of each budget cycle this paper presents three models a static model and two dynamic models in which incremental and zero base allocation procedures are viewed as extremes between which there may be a point of diminishing returns the models are risk return models in which a total budget is allocated between the budgeting effort which reduces risk and the budgeted activities which increase expected return the budget for each activity during each time stage is partitioned into two components a base and an increment the expected return for each activity is a concave increasing function of its budget and the risk depends quadratically on the base and in a geometrically decreasing fashion on the bases in previous stages the cost of evaluation is proportional to the increment and the total cost of all activities when added to the budgets for the activities cannot exceed a fixed total budget zero base budgeting means setting the base to zero so that the budget equals the increment plus the cost of evaluation it is shown that a policy of zero base budgeting during all time stages is nonoptimal but an instance of zero base budgeting during a single stage may be optimal

modeling project preferences in multiattribute portfolio decision analysis abstract when choosing a portfolio of projects with a multi attribute weighting model it is necessary to elicit trade off statements about how important these attributes are relative to each other such statements correspond to weight constraints and thus impact on which project portfolios are potentially optimal or non dominated in view of the resulting set of feasible attribute weights in this paper we extend earlier preference elicitation approaches by allowing the decision maker to make direct statements about the selection and rejection of individual projects we convert such project preference statements to weight information by determining the weights for which i the selected project is included in all potentially optimal or non dominated portfolios or ii the rejected project is not included in any potentially optimal or non dominated portfolio we prove that the two complementary selection rules will exclude exactly the same set of weights however analyses that apply the dominance structure often lead to multiple mutually exclusive feasible weight sets and therefore the approach based on potential optimality is more relevant for practical decision analysis we also propose ex ante value of information measures to guide the elicitation of project preference statements and illustrate our results by analyzing a real case on the selection of infrastructure maintenance projects

a portfolio model for siting offshore wind farms with economic and environmental objectives abstract siting offshore wind farms is a complex problem due to the wake interactions between wind farms we develop a profit maximizing portfolio model based on underlying network models to track the wake effects through a series of wind farms our portfolio model optimizes the siting of wind farms considering multiple wind directions and wind speeds and performs better than simple decision heuristics excluding sites from the portfolio has nonlinear impacts on the profitability of the portfolio of sites in that areas excluded from consideration have greater impacts on profit if they are grouped together or aligned parallel to the prevailing wind direction the model can be readily adapted to include additional cost factors

bayesian portfolio selection an empirical analysis of the s p 500 index 1970 1996 in this article we present a technique for implementing large scale optimal portfolio selection we use high frequency daily data to capture valuable statistical information in asset returns we describe several statistical issues involved in quantitative approaches to portfolio selection our methodology applies to large scale portfolio selection problems in which the number of possible holdings is large relative to the estimation period provided by historical data we illustrate our approach on an equity database that consists of stocks from the standard and poor s index and we compare our portfolios to this benchmark index our methodology differs from the usual quadratic programming approach to portfolio selection in three ways 1 we employ informative priors on the expected returns and variance covariance matrices 2 we use daily data for estimation purposes with upper and lower holding limits for individual securities and 3 we use a dynamic asset allocation approach that is based on reestim

speculative efficiency and risk premium in the market for foreign exchange abstract i show that while the unbiasedness hypothesis does not hold for the deutsche mark u s dollar exchange rate market during the period 1979 1986 a risk premium cannot be detected either in light of this inconclusiveness regarding the true model specification of exchange rate movements the davidson and mackinnon approach of selecting models from amongst non nested models is used to show that a model with risk premium is closer to the true specification than a model that implies unbiasedness

implausible alternatives in eliciting multi attribute value functions abstract many methods to elicit preference models in multi attribute decision making rely on evaluations of a set of sample alternatives by decision makers using orthogonal design methods to create this set of alternatives might require respondents to evaluate unrealistic alternatives in this paper we perform an empirical study to analyze whether the presence of such implausible alternatives has an effect on the quality of utility elicitation using a new approach to measure consistency we find that implausible alternatives in fact have a positive effect on consistency of intra attribute preference information and consistency with dominance but do not affect inter attribute preference information

bayesian estimation of the global minimum variance portfolio in this paper we consider the estimation of the weights of optimal portfolios from the bayesian point of view under the assumption that the conditional distribution of the logarithmic returns is normal using the standard priors for the mean vector and the covariance matrix we derive the posterior distributions for the weights of the global minimum variance portfolio moreover we reparameterize the model to allow informative andnon informative priors directly for the weights of the global minimum variance portfolio the posterior distributions of the portfolio weights are derived in explicit form for almost all models the models are compared by using the coverage probabilities of credible intervals in an empirical study we analyze the posterior densities of the weights of an international portfolio

tests of the hypothesis of the existence of risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract this paper tests for a risk premium in the foreign exchange market the null hypothesis of the test is the random walk hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the alternative hypothesis is that biases of current spot rates or forward rates from future spot rates are systematically related to a set of economic variables on which a risk premium may depend this paper provides firm evidence for a risk premium in the foreign exchange market the risk premium explains 10 20 of the total variance in future spot rates when the us dollar mark quarterly rates are used the magnitudes are smaller less than 10 for monthly rates

bayesian dynamic factor models and portfolio allocation we discuss the development of dynamic factor models for multivariate financial time series and the incorporation of stochastic volatility components for latent factor processes bayesian inference and computation is developed and explored in a study of the dynamic factor structure of daily spot exchange rates for a selection of international currencies the models are direct generalizations of univariate stochastic volatility models and represent specific varieties of models recently discussed in the growing multivariate stochastic volatility literature we discuss model fitting based on retrospective data and sequential analysis for forward filtering and short term forecasting analyses are compared with results from the much simpler method of dynamic variance matrix discounting that for over a decade has been a standard approach in applied financial econometrics we study these models in analysis forecasting and sequential portfolio allocation for a selected set of international exchange rate retur

modeling synergies in multi criteria supplier selection and order allocation an application to commodity trading abstract we propose a novel meta approach to support collaborative multi objective supplier selection and order allocation ssoa decisions by integrating multi criteria decision analysis and linear programming lp the proposed model accounts for suppliers performance synergy effects within a hierarchical decision structure it incorporates both heterogeneous objective data and subjective judgments of the decision makers dms representing various groups with different voting powers vps we maximize the total value of purchasing tvp by optimizing order quantity assignment to suppliers and taking into consideration their synergies encountered in different time horizons we apply the proposed model to a contractor selection and order quantity assignment problem in an agricultural commodity trading act company we maximize the strategic effectiveness of both the customers and the suppliers minimize risks increase the degree of cooperation between trading partners on all levels of supply chain integration enhance transparent knowledge sharing and aggregation and support collaborative decision making

structuring resource allocation decisions a framework for building multi criteria portfolio models with area grouped options multi criteria portfolio modelling has been extensively employed as an effective means to allocate scarce resources for investment in projects when considering costs benefits and risks some of these modelling approaches allow the grouping of projects into organisational areas thus also supporting the decision of resource allocation among organisational units in a way that is collectively efficient for the organisation however structuring in practice a portfolio model using this latter type of approach is not a trivial task how should areas be defined where should new projects be included how should one define the criteria to evaluate performance as far as we know there is very little indication in the operational research and decision sciences literatures on how to structure this type of model this paper suggests different ways to structuring portfolio models where projects are divided into areas and evaluated by multiple criteria and illustrates their use in two action research projects drawing on these experiences it then suggests a general framework for the structuring of such models in practice directions for future research are also identified

preference programming for robust portfolio modeling and project selection in decision analysis difficulties of obtaining complete information about model parameters make it advisable to seek robust solutions that perform reasonably well across the full range of feasible parameter values in this paper we develop the robust portfolio modeling rpm methodology which extends preference programming methods into portfolio problems where a subset of project proposals are funded in view of multiple evaluation criteria we also develop an algorithm for computing all non dominated portfolios subject to incomplete information about criterion weights and project specific performance levels based on these portfolios we propose a project level index to convey i which projects are robust choices in the sense that they would be recommended even if further information were to be obtained and ii how continued activities in preference elicitation should be focused the rpm methodology is illustrated with an application using real data on road pavement projects

scenario based portfolio selection of investment projects with incomplete probability and utility information abstract in the selection of investment projects it is important to account for exogenous uncertainties such as macroeconomic developments which may impact the performance of projects these uncertainties can be addressed by examining how the projects perform across several scenarios but it may be difficult to assign well founded probabilities to such scenarios or to characterize the decision makers risk preferences through a uniquely defined utility function motivated by these considerations we develop a portfolio selection framework which i uses set inclusion to capture incomplete information about scenario probabilities and utility functions ii identifies all the non dominated project portfolios in view of this information and iii offers decision support for rejection and selection of projects the proposed framework enables interactive decision support processes where the implications of additional probability and utility information or further risk constraints are shown in terms of corresponding decision recommendations

optimal strategies for selecting project portfolios using uncertain value estimates abstract practically all organizations seek to create value by selecting and executing portfolios of actions that consume resources typically the resulting value is uncertain and thus organizations must take decisions based on ex ante estimates about what this future value will be in this paper we show that the bayesian modeling of uncertainties in this selection problem serves to i increase the expected future value of the selected portfolio ii raise the expected number of selected actions that belong to the optimal portfolio ex post and iii eliminate the expected gap between the realized ex post portfolio value and the estimated ex ante portfolio value we also propose a new project performance measure defined as the probability that a given action belongs to the optimal portfolio finally we provide analytic results to determine which actions should be re evaluated to obtain more accurate value estimates before portfolio selection in particular we show that the optimal targeting of such re evaluations can yield a much higher portfolio value in return for the total resources that are spent on the execution of actions and the acquisition of value estimates

portfolio selection under distributional uncertainty a relative robust cvar approach robust optimization one of the most popular topics in the field of optimization and control since the late 1990s deals with an optimization problem involving uncertain parameters in this paper we consider the relative robust conditional value at risk portfolio selection problem where the underlying probability distribution of portfolio return is only known to belong to a certain set our approach not only takes into account the worst case scenarios of the uncertain distribution but also pays attention to the best possible decision with respect to each realization of the distribution we also illustrate how to construct a robust portfolio with multiple experts priors by solving a sequence of linear programs or a second order cone program

does competition between hospitals improve the quality of care hospital death rates and the nhs internal market payer driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of increasing efficiency in health care markets the 1990s reforms to the uk health service followed this path we examine whether competition led to better outcomes for patients as measured by death rates after treatment following heart attacks using data that until 1999 was not publicly available in any form on hospital level death rates we find that the relationship between competition and quality of care appears to be negative greater competition is associated with higher death rates controlling for patient mix and other observed characteristics of the hospital and the catchment area for its patients however the estimated impact of competition is small jel classification i1 l8 h4

incentives and targets in hospital care evidence from a natural experiment performance targets are commonly used in the public sector despite their well known problems when organisations have multiple objectives and performance is difficult to measure it is possible that such targets may work where there is considerable consensus that performance needs to be improved we investigate this possibility by examining the response of the english national health service to high profile waiting time targets we exploit a natural policy experiment between two countries of the uk england and scotland to establish the global effectiveness of the targets we then use a within england hospital analysis to confirm that responses vary by treatment intensity and to control for differences in resources which may accompany targets we find that targets met their goals of reducing waiting times without diverting activity from other less well monitored aspects of health care and without decreasing patient health on exit from hospital

the determinants of information value synthesizing some general results this paper identifies the determinants of information value and synthesizes some general results concerning their effects while some attributes of an information system exhibit a consistent directional effect on information value attributes of the decision setting and decision maker do not

estimation of portfolio balance functions that are mean variance optimizing the mark and the dollar abstract this paper offers a way of efficiently estimating the parameters in demand functions for mark and dollar assets the technique imposes the constraint that the parameters rather than being determined arbitrarily are based on investors optimizing behavior regarding expected returns and variances it dominates some previous empirical applications of finance theory in the respect that the expected returns are allowed to vary from period to period which is a necessary feature of any macro model the constraint that the parameters are based on mean variance optimization is also tested and not rejected

stochastic dominance and expected utility survey and analysis while stochastic dominance has been employed in various forms as early as 1932 it has only been since 1969 1970 that the notion has been developed and extensively employed in the area of economics finance agriculture statistics marketing and operations research in this survey the first second and third order stochastic dominance rules are discussed with an emphasis on the development in the area since the 1980s

aversion to health inequalities in healthcare prioritisation a multicriteria optimisation perspective abstract in this paper we discuss the prioritisation of healthcare projects where there is a concern about health inequalities but the decision maker is reluctant to make explicit quantitative value judgements and the data systems only allow the measurement of health at an aggregate level our analysis begins with a standard welfare economic model of healthcare resource allocation we show how under the assumption that the healthcare projects under consideration have a small impact on individual health the problem can be reformulated as one of finding a particular subset of the class of efficient solutions to an implied multicriteria optimisation problem algorithms for finding such solutions are readily available and we demonstrate our approach through a worked example of treatment for clinical depression

does hospital competition save lives evidence from the english nhs patient choice reforms recent substantive reforms to the english national health service expanded patient choice and encouraged hospitals to compete within a market with fixed prices this study investigates whether these reforms led to improvements in hospital quality we use a difference in difference style estimator to test whether hospital quality measured using mortality from acute myocardial infarction improved more quickly in more competitive markets after these reforms came into force in 2006 we find that after the reforms were implemented mortality fell i e quality improved for patients living in more competitive markets our results suggest that hospital competition can lead to improvements in hospital quality

the economic record of the 1997 2010 labour government an assessment we consider the economic record of the 1997 2010 labour government in the uk following a brief review of the government s inheritance from its predecessor we review the assessments made in the other papers in this issue of the oxford review of economic policy the change in the macroeconomic policy framework which apparently worked well for a decade but was then struck by the global financial crisis labour market social security and education policies and inequality public investment and public service delivery especially health and corporate taxation we discuss the constraints under which the government operated how much it broke with the past and the new frameworks it introduced we identify strengths and weaknesses and draw lessons from the government s record about the need to remain receptive to other and critical ideas on the one hand and the need for labour to spell out the kind of economy and society it wants to see develop on the other copyright 2013 oxford university press

selecting a portfolio of solar energy projects using multiattribute preference theory this article reports a procedure developed to assist the u s department of energy in selecting a portfolio of solar energy applications experiments the procedure has also been used in other government procurements and appears to be applicable in a variety of project funding processes the technical quality of each proposed applications experiment was summarized through the use of multiple evaluation measures or attributes these were combined into a single index of the overall technical quality of an experiment through the use of a multiattribute utility function recently derived results in measurable value theory were applied to derive an index of the overall technical quality of a portfolio of experiments budgetary and programmatic issues were handled through the use of constraints this approach allowed the portfolio selection problem to be formulated as an integer linear program details of the application are presented including a discussion of the data requirements and assessment procedure used the portfolio selection procedure was successfully applied and variations of it have been successfully used in four other solar energy procurements

adjustable robustness for multi attribute project portfolio selection abstract robust portfolio modeling rpm supports multi attribute project portfolio selection with uncertain project scores and decision maker preferences by determining non dominated portfolios for all possible realizations of uncertain parameters decision recommendations produced by rpm may prove too conservative for real life decision problems we develop a methodology to reduce the set of possible realizations by limiting the number of project scores that may simultaneously deviate from their most likely value by adjusting this limit decision makers can choose desired levels of conservatism our approach also allows to capture dependencies among project scores as well as uncertainty in portfolio constraints

an equilibrium model of the supply chain network under multi attribute behaviors analysis abstract this paper studies a supply chain network scn equilibrium model considering decision makers multi attribute behaviors from the perspective of behavioral finance in this paper an equilibrium model of an uncertain snc is constructed in which retailers choose their decisions according to their risk averse behavior loss averse behavior and regret averse behavior by using different weights to represent retailers attitudes to these three behaviors the retailers multi attribute utility functions are developed the equilibrium conditions of the manufacturers the retailers together with the network are established by the finite dimensional variational inequality formulation three numerical examples are solved in the first numerical example we illustrate the effect of each of these three behaviors on the equilibrium decisions the profits and the utilities of the decision makers in the other two numerical examples we explore the effects of changes in attitudes to these three behaviors on the equilibrium decisions profits and utilities of the decision makers the numerical results show that the equilibrium decisions are affected by each of these three behaviors very much moreover they are sensitive to the changes in attitudes to these behaviors

measurement issues in the evaluation of projects in a project portfolio abstract a common problem arising in many domains is how value the benefits of projects in a project portfolio recently there has been some attention given to a decision analysis practice whereby analysts define a value function on some criterion by setting 0 as the value of the worst project in particular clemen and smith have argued this practice is not sound as it gives different results from the case where projects are priced out and makes a strong implicit assumption about the value of not doing a project in this paper we underscore the criticism of this way of using value functions by showing it can lead to a rank reversal we provide a measurement theoretic account of the phenomenon showing that the problem arises from using evaluating projects on an interval scale such as a value scale whereas to guard against such rank reversals benefits must be measured on at least a ratio scale seen from this perspective we discuss how the solution proposed by clemen and smith of reformulating the underlying optimisation problem to allow for explicitly non zero values addresses the issue and explore in what sense it may be open to similar problems in closing we discuss what lessons from practice may be drawn from this analysis focussing on settings where the clemen and smith proposal may not be the most natural way of modelling

multistage decision making fuzzy methodology for optimal investments based on experts evaluations abstract a new methodology of making a decision on an optimal investment in several projects is proposed the methodology is based on experts evaluations and consists of three stages in the first stage kaufmann s expertons method is used to reduce a possibly large number of applicants for credit using the combined expert data the credit risk level is determined for each project only the projects with low risks are selected in the second stage the model of refined decisions is constructed using the new modification of the previously proposed possibilistic discrimination analysis method sirbiladze khutsisvili dvalishvili 2010 this stage is based on expert knowledge and experience the projects selected in the first stage are compared in order to identify high quality ones among them the possibility levels of experts preferences are calculated and the projects are ranked finally the third stage deals with the bicriteria discrete optimization problem whose solution makes it possible to arrange the most advantageous investment in several projects simultaneously the decision on funding the selected projects is made and an optimal distribution of the allocated investment amount among them is provided the efficiency of the proposed methodology is illustrated by an example

selecting a portfolio of nonhomogeneous r d proposals abstract this article reports a procedure developed to assist the u s department of energy in the selection of a portfolio of proposals addressing the design and manufacture of components of solar photovoltaic arrays and complete photovoltaic systems considerations such as the relative importance of the different components in the overall effort compatibility of the proposed designs and budgetary and programmatic issues were complicating factors the technical quality of each proposal was represented by multiple evaluation measures these were combined into a single index through the use of multi attributeutility function indices representing the relative importance of the various components were then developed and results in measurable value theory were applied to derive an index of technical quality of a portfolio of proposals the problem was then formulated as an integer program it was solved by using an interactive branch and bound code that allowed for sensitivity analysis before selecting the portfolio of proposals for funding the procedure was successfully applied to funding a portfolio of proposals aimed at reducing the cost of producing photovoltaic arrays and to several other government sponsored procurements

an assessment of labour s record on health and healthcare this paper examines the record of the 1997 2010 labour administration on health and healthcare it begins by outlining the policies adopted by the administration with respect to the delivery of healthcare services and population health it then presents a two part assessment in the first part we examine the performance of the administration with respect to improvements in healthcare and population health in the second part we examine the healthcare policy record copyright 2013 oxford university press

dynamic portfolio selection of npd programs using marginal returns selecting program portfolios within a budget constraint is an important challenge in the management of new product development npd optimal portfolios are difficult to define because of the combinatorial complexity of project combinations however at the aggregate level of the strategic allocation of resources across product lines investment in a program is not an all or nothing decision but can beadjusted resulting in a higher or lower program benefit e g higher or lower quality in some cases resources can be adjusted even for individual projects with this insight one can usemarginal analysis to optimally allocate the scarce budget this article develops a dynamic model of resource allocation taking into account multiple interacting factors such as independent or correlated uncertain market payoffs that change over time increasing or decreasing returns from the npd investment carry over of the investment benefit over multiple periods and interactions across market segments we characterize optimal policies in closed form and derive qualitative decision rules for managers

contingent portfolio programming for the management of risky projects methods for selecting a research and development r d project portfolio have attracted considerable interest among practitioners and academics this notwithstanding the industrial uptake of these methods has remained limited partly because of the difficulties of capturing relevant concerns in r d portfolio management motivated by these difficulties we develop contingent portfolio programming cpp which extends earlier approaches in that it i uses states of nature to capture exogenous uncertainties ii models resources through dynamic state variables and iii provides guidance for the selection of an optimal project portfolio that is compatible with the decision maker s risk attitude although cpp is presented here in the context of r d project portfolios it is applicable to a variety of investment problems where the dynamics and interactions of investment opportunities must be accounted for