PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
Thursday 2 of December
08h30-09h00:
Registration
09h00-09h15:
Opening session, CNRS and Université Paris Dauphine
representatives
FP7 Opportunities: ICT
for Policy Modelling (by Maria Geronymaki, INFSO) [slides]
Session 1.
Chair Valerie Belton
09h15-10h00 Alexis Tsoukiàs, CNRS – LAMSADE, What is
evident in evidence based policy making? [slides]
10h00-10h45 Fred Roberts, DIMACS, Measuring biodiversity [slides]
10h45-11h00
Coffee Break
Session 2.
Chair Gilberto Montibeler
11h00-11h45 Alec Morton, London School of Economics,
Incorporating Health Inequalities considerations in healthcare priority setting
11h45-12h30 Denis Bouyssou, CNRS – LAMSADE, Ranking
scientists and departments in a consistent manner [slides]
12h30-14h30
Lunch (offered on the premises)
At 13h30 there will be an informal
session where officials from DG INFSO of the EU will explain funding
opportunities on issues related to ICT and policy modelling within the FP7.
The session will be animated by Maria
Geronymaki.
Session 3.
Chair: Simon French
14h30-15h15 David Rios Insua,
Royal Academy of Sciences, Evidence based policy making: Some experiences from water management
problems [slides]
15h15-16h00 Olivier Barreteau, CEMAGREF, Simulation model
of “drought committees” in practice
16h00-16h30
Coffee Break
Session 4.
Chair: Maria Franca Norese
16h30-17h15 Marta Bottero, Politecnico di Torino,
Sustainability assessment and public participation in territorial planning [slides]
17h15-18h00 Marc Pirlot, Université
de Mons, Decision aiding in geographical contexts
Friday 3 of December
Session 5.
Chair Denis Bouyssou
09h00-09h45 Maria Franca Norese, Politecnico
di Torino, How to support and orient monitoring
towards a learning system for the future [slides]
09h45-10h30 Thierry Marchant, Ghent University, SEU without preference
relation.
10h30-11h00
Coffee Break
Session 6.
Chair Alec Morton
11h00-11h45 Simon French, Manchester Business School, Expert
Judgement, Meta-Analysis and Evidence Based Policy Making
11h45-12h30 Gabriella Pigozzi, LAMSADE, Judgment
Aggregation in Abstract Argumentation [slides]
12h30-14h30
Lunch (offered on the premises)
Session 7.
Chair David Rios Insua
14h30-15h15 Cliff Behrens, Telcordia
Applied Research, Making
Policy with Sparse Evidence: When Expert Judgments Count
15h15-16h00 Gilberto Montibeler,
London School of Economics, Weak-Evidence Based Decision
Making: Assessing Animal Health Threats for DEFRA
16h00-16h30
Coffee Break
Session 8.
Chair Alexis Tsoukiàs
16h30-17h15 Vivien Kana, Université
d’Ouagadougou, Poverty Measurement for Policy Making
17h15-18h00 General Discussion
ABSTRACTS
Incorporating health inequalities
considerations in healthcare priority setting.
How should
commissioners and policy makers take into account health inequalities in their prioritisation of possible healthcare expenditures? In this
paper, which is based on extensive experience working with commissioners in
England and Canada, we present a theory-based and practical method for
informing prioritisation decisions which takes
explicit account of health inequalities in a way which imposes only modest time
and data demands on Primary Care Trusts and their management.
Expert Judgement, Meta-Analysis and Evidence
Based Policy Making
Some twenty
five years ago, I distinguished three contexts in which one might wish to
combine expert judgements of uncertainty: the expert
problem, the group decision problem and the textbook problem. Over the intervening years much has been
written on the first two, which have the focus of a single decision context,
but little on the third, though the closely related field of meta-analysis has
developed considerably. The text-book
problem relates to how one should draw expert judgements
into a decision analysis when those judgements were
made originally in other contexts.
However, as societal decision making has become more open, as
stakeholders have become involved in framing and deciding on policy, and as the
imperatives for evidence-based decision making have grown, the need to address
the text-book problem has become more apparent.
Further the growth of the Web and the ease with which we may all access
past reports and studies have exacerbated our need for coherent methodologies
to combine and use expert judgement ‘out of context’. Put simply, we have meta-analyses for data;
we need them for judgements too.
Simulation model of “drought
committees” in practice.
The French
water act institutionalizes a drought committee at county level. Such committee
sets the rules characterizing a situation of drought and how to react when such
situations occur. The enforcement of these rules depends on the actual
characterization of a drought situation, which happens to be controversial due
to the salience of the issue for participants in such committees and to the
multiplicity of places and protocols to assess the actual situation. I will
first describe how various information sources are considered in such
committees, then the consequences on the enforcement of drought management
rules supposedly based on "scientific" knowledge and evidence. In a
last part I will present a simulation model aiming at exploring the sensitivity
of a virtual basin to scenarios of action of such drought committees.
Judgment aggregation in abstract argumentation
Individuals
may draw different conclusions from the same evidence. For example, members of
a jury may disagree on the verdict even though each member possesses the same
evidence regarding the case under discussion. This happens because individuals
can hold different reasonable positions based on the information they share.
The field of judgment aggregation studies how
individual positions on the same information can be aggregated into a
collective one. After a gentle introduction to judgment aggregation, I will
offer an analysis of judgment aggregation problems using an argumentation
approach. One of the principles of argumentation theory is that an
argumentation framework can have several labellings.
If the information the group shares is represented by an argumentation
framework, and each agent's reasonable position is a labelling
of that argumentation framework, the question becomes how to aggregate the
individual positions into a collective one.
Whereas judgment aggregation focuses
on the observation that the aggregation of individual logically
consistent judgments may lead to an inconsistent group outcome, I will
present an approach that not only ensures collective rationality but also
social outcomes that are 'compatible' with the individuals' evaluations. This
ensures that no individual member has to become committed to a group position
that is in conflict with his own individual position.
(Part of my
presentation will be based on a joint work with Martin Caminada
and Mikolaj Podlaszewski.)
Evidence based policy making: Some experiences
from water management problems
Water
resources problems provide many challenges for policy making due to the
presence of multiple objectives, multiple uncertainties, several decision
makers, multiple stakeholders and the effects of time. We shall describe two
complex water resources problems in which we have been recently involved:
* The
optimal planning of the Kwanza river in Angola.
* A fair
water distribution scheme in Kabylia, Algeria.
We shall
cover some of the lessons learnt in dealing with such problems.
(work done with Angel Udias, Javier
Cano, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Kiombo Jean Marie,
University Agostinho Neto, Hocine Fellag, Université Tizi Ouzou)
How to support and orient monitoring towards a
learning system for the future
Monitoring
processes can support policy making with information, knowledge and values that
are not naturally available but have to be “stimulated” and then synthesised and transferred. This kind of intervention
should not perturb the monitoring context and could orient the process. It has
to elaborate a “picture of the situation” clear enough to be understood and
collectively analysed. At the same time this picture
has to be perceived as the result of a totally documented procedure and not as
a personal and subjective elaboration. The integrated use of formal tools can
accomplish such objectives, when combined approaches and methods support
communication, visualisation of complex relations and
translation of the different significant elements in a transparent, consistent
and formal language. Knowledge structures emerging from case studies are
proposed. They show how multiple criteria methods and problem/model structuring
methodologies can be used in monitoring contexts in order to support policy
makers in understanding contexts, processes and related results as well as in
conceiving improvements or new policies.
(Joint work
with Chiara Novelo)
What is evident in evidence based policy
making?
The
necessity to use some evidence in order to conceive, design and/or assess
public policies became a subject of debate already several years ago. At the
same time it started to become a subject of scientific investigation. However,
it is not really clear what evidence means in supporting a policy. First of all
what we consider as “facts” in reality are synthetic measurements of more
complex realities and as such subject to biases and uncertainties of any
measurement procedure. Besides, quite often such information has to be
extracted out of huge data bases and or streaming processes. Second, such facts
need to be understood and interpreted in a shared way by different stakeholders
and it is not clear how such a process can occur consistently. Third, policies
are also based on values, preferences and judgments (possibly representing
large parties of the societies affected by the policies) and the way to
consider these can again be a subject of controversy. Fourth, the way through
which all such information is manipulated can end up constructing “different
evidences” by just adopting (for instance) a different concept of majority.
Based on such remarks we elaborate the claim that evidence based policy making
should be understood as a specific type of decision aiding process. We then
introduce a second claim: the challenge for decision sciences and technologies
in this area consists in elaborating a “policy analytics” perspective.
(Part of my
presentation uses work done with Wassila Ouerdane, Giulia Lucertini and Giada de Marchi).
Ranking scientists and departments in a
consistent manner
The
standard data that we use when computing bibliometric
rankings of scientists are just their publication / citation records, i.e., so
many papers with 0 citation, so many with 1 citation,
so many with 2 citations, etc. The standard data for bibliometric
rankings of departments have the same structure. It is therefore tempting (and
many authors gave in to temptation) to use the same method for computing
rankings of scientists and rankings of departments. Depending on the method,
this can yield quite surprising and unpleasant results. Suppose for instance
that we have two departments each consisting of two scientists. The scientists
in department 1 both have 4 papers, each one cited 4 times. The scientists in
department 2 both have 3 papers, each one cited 6 times. Let us rank the
scientists and the departments using the h-index. Both scientists in department
1 have h-index 4 and are therefore better than both scientists in department 2,
with h-index 3. Yet, department 1 has h-index 4 and is therefore worse than
department 2 with h-index 6, so that the “best” department contains the “worst”
scientists. This problem will not occur if the rankings satisfy a property called
consistency, recently introduced in the literature. In this paper, we explore
the consequences of consistency and we characterize two families of consistent
rankings.
(Joint work with Thierry Marchant).
SEU without preference relation
In his celebrated theorem about
Subjective Expected Utility, Savage assumes the agent’s preferences can be modelled by a complete ordering of the acts. This paper
shows that subjective expected utility can be obtained using primitives that
are much poorer than a preference relation on the set of acts. Our primitives
only involve the fact that an act can be judged either “attractive” or “unattractive”.
These categories may be interpreted as denoting the position of an act
vis-à-vis a status quo. We give conditions implying that there are a utility
function on the set of consequences and a probability distribution on the set
of states such that attractive (resp. unattractive) acts have a subjective
expected utility that is above (resp. below) some threshold. The numerical
representation that is obtained has strong uniqueness properties, exactly as in
Savage’s original theorem. Our derivation uses results in conjoint measurement
with ordered categories and, hence, we adopt a framework involving a finite set
of states.
(Joint work with Denis Bouyssou)
Sustainability assessment and public participation in territorial
planning
Sustainable development is a
multidimensional concept that includes socio-economic, ecological, technical
and ethical perspectives and thus leads to issues that are characterized by a
high degree of conflict, complexity and uncertainty. The assessment of
alternative scenarios of territorial transformation can be seen as a complex
decision problem where different aspects need to be taken into account
simultaneously, with reference both to technical elements, which are based on
empirical observations, and non technical elements, which are based on social
visions, preferences and feelings. Furthermore, when speaking about urban and territorial planning, public participation
and citizens’ involvement in decision-making processes have become an issue of
increasing importance over the last decades. The work addresses the
problem of sustainability assessment and public participation in urban and territorial
planning using the Analytic Network Process (Saaty,
2005). The case study refers to the decision problem concerning the development of
the Municipal Plan of Volta Mantovana (Italy). Five
different zones have been identified and compared through the ANP in order to
select the most important areas to which it is necessary to pay more attention
in the planning process. Participation of the stakeholders is a central part of
the proposed approach. As a result, the work proposes some reflections
concerning the critical validation of the model and the possibilities of
expanding the study.
Decision aiding in geographical contexts
Abstract:
Conceiving and developing tools for aiding decision in problems amenable to
spatial representation has received increasing attention in recent years.
Applications pertain, for instance, to land use management and localization of
facilities (windfarms, obnoxious facilities,...). One of the goals is to implement decision aiding
tools and methods in geographic information systems (GIS). In this
presentation, we focus on new methods developed in the context of an
application to land use assessment of a region in West Africa (Burkina Faso) in
the perspective of sustainable development. We mainly address the question of
comparing the state of a territory at two different moments. This question is
of importance for the assessment of policies that aim at improving the current
state of a given region. We propose two models allowing for such an assessment
on the basis of observing the current state of a region and the way it has
evolved after a period of application of a policy.
Measurement of Biodiversity
Among the potential effects of
climate change, health of ecosystems is of concern. Evidence for the health of
ecosystems is often obtained by measuring the biodiversity. An index of
biodiversity allows us to set specific goals and measure progress toward them.
This talk will survey indices for biodiversity and axiomatic approaches leading
to such indices.
Weak-Evidence Based Decision Making: Assessing
Animal Health Threats for DEFRA
One of the
pillars of evidence-based decision making is that policy makers should use the
best available evidence to assess the consequences of implementing a policy.
But what if the evidence required is incomplete, soft or unavailable? Even more
challenging, what if there are many options to be assessed and thus extensive
evidence gathering is unfeasible or too expensive? In this talk we discuss
these challenges in the context of a real-world project that we recently were
involved: the development of a decision support system for DEFRA (the UK
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to assess and prioritise animal health threats.
Making Policy with Sparse Evidence: When
Expert Judgments Count
There are situations when little empirical information
exists for policy-making. For example, there may not be enough time or
funding to gather new information, or in some extreme situations, such as
anticipating the consequences of a dirty bombing in a metropolitan subway, data
collection may be impossible. In cases like these, judgments provided by
subject matter experts can prove invaluable, and may be the only resort.
This talk will review some of the issues associated with using experts to make
policies in the larger context of expert panel lifecycles. This synoptic
view properly focuses attention on the selection and qualification of experts,
the development of valid data-collection instruments, the application of
experimental designs to proactively solicit representative data, and
statistical methods for deriving consensus answers from expert panel
data. The technical approach proposed in this talk takes advantage of new
Web-based collaboration infrastructures and "cultural consensus analysis,"
a technique developed by quantitative anthropologists to derive the
"best" set of answers to questions. This approach is
particularly useful for stimulating idea-sharing, exposing expert biases and
mitigating the adverse effects of "group think."