Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes

In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. This book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

The CAR Method for Using Preference Strength in Multi-criteria Decision Making

Multi-criteria decision aid (MCDA) methods have been around for quite some time. However, the elicitation of preference information in MCDA processes, and in particular the lack of practical means supporting it, is still a significant problem in real-life applications of MCDA. There is obviously a need for methods that neither require formal decision analysis knowledge, nor are too cognitively demanding by forcing people to express unrealistic precision or to state more than they are able to. We suggest a method, the CAR method, which is more accessible than our earlier approaches in the field while trying to balance between the need for simplicity and the requirement of accuracy. CAR takes primarily ordinal knowledge into account, but, still recognizing that there is sometimes a quite substantial information loss involved in ordinality, we have conservatively extended a pure ordinal scale approach with the possibility to supply more information. Thus, the main idea here is not to suggest a method or tool with a very large or complex expressibility, but rather to investigate one that should be sufficient in most situations, and in particular better, at least in some respects, than some hitherto popular ones from the SMART family as well as AHP, which we demonstrate in a set of simulation studies as well as a large end-user study

Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes

What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences

A mathematical modeling-based method to estimate utility function weights in multiple criteria decision making problems

Çok Kriterli Karar Verme (ÇKKV) problemlerindeki temel bir konu, karar vericinin (KV) tercihlerinin problem çözme sürecine dâhil edilmesidir. Birçok ÇKKV yöntemi, KV tercihlerinin fayda fonksiyonları yoluyla modellenebileceğini varsaymaktadır. Bu fonksiyonların parametre değerleri farklı KV’lerin problemle ilgili farklı önceliklerini ortaya koymaktadır. Literatürdeki çok sayıda yaklaşım, bu parametrelerin baştan bilindiğini kabul etmekte veya KV’nin bunları doğru bir şekilde doğrudan ifade edebileceğini varsaymaktadır. Tercih parametrelerini elde etmek için geliştirilen yöntemler ise KV’nin çok sayıda değerlendirme ve karşılaştırma yapmasını gerektirebilmekte ve karmaşık süreçler içerebilmektedir. Bu çalışmada geliştirdiğimiz matematiksel programlama temelli yöntem, ağırlıklı toplam şeklinde ifade edilen fayda fonksiyonlarının kriter ağırlıklarını KV için bilişsel zorluk yaratmayacak az sayıda tercih değerlendirmesi ile tahmin etmektedir. KV’den direkt olarak kriterleri değerlendirmesi istenmemekte, sınırlı sayıda karar alternatifini tercih sırasına sokması beklenmektedir. Geliştirilen yöntem, üç kriterli finansal portfolyo seçimi problemine ve beş kriterle değerlendirilen dünya üniversitelerinin sıralanması problemine uygulanmıştır. Karşılaştırma yapmak amacıyla literatürde kullanılan başka bir ağırlık tahmini yöntemi de (Swing yöntemi) aynı problemlere uygulanmıştır. Geliştirdiğimiz yaklaşımın bu yöntemden daha kullanışlı olduğu, daha az bilişsel yük getirdiği ve daha iyi sonuçlar verdiği gözlemlenmiştir.A basic issue in Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problems is to include the preferences of the decision maker (DM) in the problem solution process. Many MCDM methods assume that DM preferences can be modeled in the form of utility functions. The parameters of these functions represent varying priorities of different DMs about the problem. Several approaches in the literature assume that these parameters are already known or the DM can express them directly and correctly. The approaches developed to derive preferential parameters may require the DM to make many assessments and comparisons, and involve complex procedures. The mathematical programming-based method developed in this study estimates criteria weights in weighted sum utility functions by few preference assessments without imposing cognitive difficulty on the DM. The DM is not asked to directly evaluate criteria but to rank a limited number of alternatives in preference order. The developed approach is applied to a financial portfolio selection problem with three criteria and a university ranking problem with five criteria. For comparison, the Swing method is also applied to the same problems. The proposed method is observed to be more convenient, impose less cognitive burden and provide superior results

Multiple criteria decision analysis for assessing the value of new medical technologies: researching, developing and applying a new value framework for the purpose of health technology assessment

Introduction: Current evaluation approaches for new medical technologies are problematic for a plethora of reasons relating to measuring their expected costs and consequences, but also due to hurdles in turning assessed information into coverage decisions. Most adopted methodologies focus on a limited number of value dimensions, despite the fact that the value of new medicines is multi-dimensional in nature. Explicit elicitation of social value tradeoffs is not possible and decision-makers may adopt intuitive or heuristic modes for simplification purposes, based on ad hoc procedures that might lead to arbitrary decisions. Objectives: The objective of the present thesis is to develop and empirically test a methodological framework that can be used to assess the overall value of new medical technologies by explicitly capturing multiple aspects of value while allowing for their tradeoffs, through the incorporation of decision-makers’ preferences in a structured and transparent way. The research hypothesis is that Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) can provide a methodological option for the evaluation of new medicines in the context of Health Technology Assessment (HTA), to support decision-making and contribute to more efficient resource allocation. Methods and Empirical Evidence: The first paper proposes a conceptual methodological process, based on multi-attribute value theory (MAVT) methods comprising five distinct phases, outlining the stages involved in each phase and discusses their relevance in the HTA context. The second paper conducts a systematic literature review and expert consultation in order to investigate the practices, processes and policies of value-assessment for new medicines across eight European countries and identifies the evaluation criteria employed and how these inform coverage recommendations as part of HTA. The third paper develops a MAVT value framework for HTA, incorporating a generic value tree for new medicines composed from different levels of criteria that fall under five value domains (i.e. therapeutic, safety, burden of disease, innovation and socio-economic), together with a selection of scoring, weighting and aggregating techniques. In the fourth and fifth papers, the value framework is tested empirically by conducting two real-world case studies: in the first, the value tree is adapted for the evaluation of second-line biological treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) patients having received prior oxaliplatin-based chemotherapy; in the second, the value tree is conditioned for the evaluation of third-line treatments for metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) patients having received prior docetaxel chemotherapy. Both case studies were informed by decision conferences with relevant expert panels. In the mCRC decision conference multiple stakeholders participated reflecting the composition of the English National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) technology appraisal committees, whereas in the mCRPC decision conference a group of evaluators participated from the Swedish Dental and Pharmaceutical Benefits Agency (TLV), thereby adopting the TLV decision-making perspective. Policy Implications: The value scores produced from the MCDA process reflect a more comprehensive benefit metric that embeds the preferences of stakeholders and decisionsmakers across a number of explicit evaluation criteria. The incorporation of alternative treatments’ purchasing costs can then be used to derive incremental cost value ratios based on which the treatments can be ranked on ‘value-for-money’ grounds, reflecting their incremental cost relative to incremental value. Conclusion: The MCDA value framework developed can aid HTA decision-makers by allowing them to explicitly consider multiple criteria and their relative importance, enabling them to understand and incorporate their own preferences and value trade-offs in a constructed and transparent way. It can be turned into a flexible decision tool for resource allocation purposes in the coverage of new medicines by payers but could also be adapted for other decision-making contexts along their development, regulation and use