Decision Rules for Global Donors

A Public Lecture by Professor Alec Morton

Thursday, March 2nd 2017 at 16.15-17.15
Hall M2, Otakaari 1, Aalto University School of Science
Otakaari 1, Espoo

Abstract

The early years of the century have seen great advances in the health of the poorest people on the planet.  Nevertheless there is still a huge and unacceptable gap between the health which those of us born in rich countries enjoy, and the health of those in the poorest countries.  A vitally important part of ensuring that advances are sustained and built on is financial aid from rich countries to poor ones, but financial aid is necessary but not sufficient to ensure the transformation that will have to be achieved. Aid donors must also ensure that countries build the financial capacity to deliver healthcare for their own population on a sustainable basis, and the allocation rules used by aid donors must reflect this.  In this talk we present a game theoretic analysis of the relationship between a donor and a country.  The donor has a healthcare related mission and the country cares about healthcare but also about other things.  We show how our model produces both insight and operationalisable rules for guiding aid donation. 

The Public Lecture is organized by the Systems Analysis Laboratory research group at the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis of Aalto University School of Science.

Background

Alec Morton is a professor in the Department of Management Science at the University of Strathclyde. He has degrees from the University of Manchester and the University of Strathclyde. He has worked for Singapore Airlines, the National University of Singapore, and the London School of Economics, has held visiting positions at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Aalto University in Helsinki, and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, and has been on secondment at the National Audit Office.  His main interests are in decision analysis and health economics, and he is one of the developers of the STAR toolkit sponsored by the Health Foundation.  He is a member of the International Decision Support Initiative and the Health Service Research Center of USTC.

Alec has been active in the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society and the OR Society. He is on the Editorial Board of Decision Analysis and is an Associate Editor for the EURO Journal on Decision Processes, the Transactions of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and OR Spectrum. Past consulting clients include the National Audit Office, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria. His papers have won awards from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research and the Society for Risk Analysis.  His book Portfolio Decision Analysis with Jeff Keisler and Ahti Salo won the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society publication award in 2013 and his paper "CUT: A Multicriteria Approach for Concavifiable Preferences" (with Nikos Argyris and Jose Figueira) was a finalist for the same prize in 2016 .

Participation

The Public Lecture is open to all interested participants. If you plan to attend, we kindly request you to send an email to Yrjänä Hynninen (firstname.lastname@aalto.fi).

After the lecture there will be an opportunity for informal discussions while enjoying some refreshments. 

At noon on Friday, March 3rd 2017, Prof. Morton will be the official opponent in the public defence of Pekka Mild's Doctoral Dissertation entitled Portfolio Decision Analysis for Infrastructure and Innovation Management (Lecture Hall H304, Otakaari 1). You are most welcome to attend this public defence.  

Aalto Systems Forum

The growing challenge of our time is the need to have the ability to see and manage wholes, i.e. systems. The Aalto Systems Forum aims to be a platform of dialogue for practitioners and researchers to share the latest results of the field by top international scholars.

Aalto Systems Forum is organized by the Systems Analysis Laboratory research group at the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis of Aalto University School of Science. http://www.sal.hut.fi/en/aaltosystemsforum /