40,502 research outputs found
The New Governance and the Tools of Public Action: An Introduction
A fundamental re-thinking is currently underway throughout the world about how to cope with public problems. Stimulated by popular frustrations with the cost and effectiveness of government programs and by a new-found faith in liberal economic theories, serious questions are being raised about the capabilities, and even the motivations, of public-sector institutions. This type of questioning has spread beyond American political discourse to other parts of the world. Underlying much of this reform surge is a set of theories that portrays government agencies as tightly structured hierarchies insulated from market forces and from effective citizen pressure and therefore free to serve the personal and institutional interests of bureaucrats instead. The heart of this revolution has been a fundamental transformation not just in the scope and scale of government action, but in its basic forms. Instead of relying exclusively on government to solve public problems, a host of other actors is being mobilized as well, sometimes are their own initiative but often in complex partnerships with the state
Cooperating intelligent systems
Some of the issues connected to the development of a bureaucratic system are discussed. Emphasis is on a layer multiagent approach to distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). The division of labor in a bureaucracy is considered. The bureaucratic model seems to be a fertile model for further examination since it allows for the growth and change of system components and system protocols and rules. The first part of implementing the system would be the construction of a frame based reasoner and the appropriate B-agents and E-agents. The agents themselves should act as objects and the E-objects in particular should have the capability of taking on a different role. No effort was made to address the problems of automated failure recovery, problem decomposition, or implementation. Instead what has been achieved is a framework that can be developed in several distinct ways, and which provides a core set of metaphors and issues for further research
Policy Conflict Analysis in Distributed System Management
Accepted versio
Agricultural extension - generic challenges and the ingredients for solutions
Is agricultural extension in developing countries up to the task of providing the information, ideas, and organization needed to meet food needs? What role should governments play in implementing or facilitating extension services? Roughly 80 percent of the world's extension is publicly funded and delivered by civil servants, providing a range of services to the farming population, commercial producers, and disadvantaged target groups. Budgetary constraints and concerns about performance create pressure to show the payoff on investment in extension and to explore alternatives to publicly providing it. The authors analyze the challenges facing policymakers who must decide what role governments should play in implementing or facilitating extension services. Focusing on developing country experience, they identify generic challenges that make it difficult to organize extension: a) The magnitude of the task. b) Dependence on wider policy and other agency functions. c) Problems in identifying the cause and effect needed to enable accountability and to get political support and funding. d) Liability for public service functions beyond the transfer of agricultural knowledge and information. e) Fiscal sustainability. f) Inadequate interaction with knowledge generators. The authors show how various extension approaches were developed in attempts to overcome the challenges of extension: 1) Improving extension management. 2) Decentralizing. 3) Focusing on single commodities. 4) Providing free-for-service public extension services. 5) Establishing institutional pluralism. 6) Empowering people by using participatory approaches. 7) Using appropriate media. Each of the approaches has weaknesses and strengths, and in their analysis the authors identify the ingredients that show promise. Rural people know when something is relevant and effective. The aspects of agricultural extension services that tend to be inherently low cost and build reciprocal, mutually trusting relationships are those most likely to produce commitment, accountability, political support, fiscal sustainability, and the kinds of effective interaction that generate knowledge.ICT Policy and Strategies,Decentralization,Enterprise Development&Reform,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Agricultural Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Agricultural Research
The inhibiting factors that principal investigators experience in leading publicly funded research
Securing public funding to conduct research and leading it by being a principal investigator (PI) is seen as significant career development step. Such a role brings professional prestige but also new responsibilities beyond research leadership to research management. If public funding brings financial and infrastructure support, little is understood about the inhibiting factors that publicly funded PIs face given the research autonomy offered by publicly funded research. Our study finds that there are three key PI inhibiting factors (1) political and environmental, (2) institutional and (3) project based. Traditional knowledge, skills and technical know-how of publicly funded PIs are insufficient to deal with the increasing managerial demands and expectations i.e. growing external bureaucracy of public funding agencies. Public funding is no longer the 'freest form of support' as suggested by Chubin and Hackett (Peerless science: peer review and US science policy. Suny Press, New York, 1990) and the inhibiting factors experienced by publicly funded PIs limits their research autonomy. We also argue that PIs have little influence in overcoming these inhibiting factors despite their central role in conducting publicly funded research
Human-Agent Decision-making: Combining Theory and Practice
Extensive work has been conducted both in game theory and logic to model
strategic interaction. An important question is whether we can use these
theories to design agents for interacting with people? On the one hand, they
provide a formal design specification for agent strategies. On the other hand,
people do not necessarily adhere to playing in accordance with these
strategies, and their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and
psychological factors. In this paper we will consider the question of whether
strategies implied by theories of strategic behavior can be used by automated
agents that interact proficiently with people. We will focus on automated
agents that we built that need to interact with people in two negotiation
settings: bargaining and deliberation. For bargaining we will study game-theory
based equilibrium agents and for argumentation we will discuss logic-based
argumentation theory. We will also consider security games and persuasion games
and will discuss the benefits of using equilibrium based agents.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729
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