Leading the problems most critical to government decision makers worldwide are those that derive from privatization, democratization, and decentralization. Dr. Nagel and a panel of academics and practitioners help clarify the ways in which problems traceable to these trends are being handled -- and how they might be handled better -- in light of the goals, experiences, constraints, and other factors affecting participants in world governance. Among the many important features of the book is its interdisciplinary approach and the way it offers African, Asian, Latin American, European and North American viewpoints. It also combines the perspectives of liberal and conservative ideologies. Cross-national with concrete examples and broad concepts and principles carefully detailed, the book is an important source of background and insight. Nagel and the contributors make clear that privatizing can involve shifting from government to private operations, with or without government ownership and with or without liberal contract provisions to protect consumers, workers, or the environment. They show that democratization can include the expansion of political participation and can give minorities the legal right to convert the majority to their positions, possibly the technological and economic facilitators as well. They also investigate ways in which national or state governments can be involved as "high units" in decentralization processes, but show that decentralization can involve local governments, neighborhoods, businesses, or even individuals as the lower or "decentral units." Throughout, the book offers alternative positions and discusses their consequences from a variety of cross-nationaland interdisciplinary perspectives.

Among the most intractable problems in the public sector is how to train effective administrators. Nagel and the contributors to this wide-ranging investigation show how worldwide the training problem is, and how critical is the need to solve it. Included here are discussions of, among other issues, how to motivate, reward, promote, and sanction new and experienced hires, and also how to deal with them fairly and productively in other ways. They explore ways to provide training courses in colleges, government agencies, and private sector training facilities, how to teach specific subjects, such as financial administration (including taxation, spending, budgeting), and how to develop and implement public policies that are effective, efficient, and equitable.

Interdisciplinary as well as cross-national, the book provides viewpoints from both academics and practitioners - people from political science, public administration, public policy and related disciplines. It also offers a combination of liberal and conservative ideological viewpoints, and reaches into Africa, Asia, East and West Europe, Latin America and North America for its viewpoints. Among the book's features are its stress on the importance of well-trained public administrators, its coverage of the controversial aspects of public administration training, and its success at integrating the substance of public policy with administrative procedures. The result is a major source of information for public administrators and policy makers already in government service and for students in academic programs preparing them for it.

This book demonstrates the use of the personal computer as an integral component of legal decision making. Nagel begins with an overview of the use of microcomputers as a tool in the legal decision-making process. He reviews in detail the currently available decision-aiding software. Several important areas of decision-making are covered, including predicting the outcome of future cases in light of previous relevant cases and present facts; litigation choices such as whether to go to trial or to settle; allocating attorney resources; and negotiating and mediating. The book can help one's law practice more profitable, less time-consuming, and more competitive.

The use of microcomputers as decision aids in law practice is increasing rapidly. Nagel here shows how developments in software over the last few years are making microcomputers practically indispensable to lawyers as decision aids. This is in contrast to his earlier book on "Microcomputers as Decision Aids in Law Practice." It dealt speculatively with ways in which decision-aiding software could be used by lawyers for judicial prediction, litigation strategy, allocating scarce resources, and negotiation-mediation.

The book is divided into three parts covering general developments, specific lawyer skills, and application to all fields of law. The first part previews various uses of decision-aiding software by practicing lawyers, including a general discussion of the potential and actual benefits of such software. How decision-aiding software enhances specific lawyer skills comprises the second and largest part of the work. Among the topics discussed are computer-aided counseling, computer-aided mediation, legal policy evaluation and computer-aided advocacy, law prediction, and legal administration. In the third part, Nagel assesses applications of decision-aiding software to all fields of law, with an emphasis on contracts, property, torts, family law, criminal law, constitutional law, economic regulation, international law, civil procedure, and criminal procedure. In a provocative concluding chapter, he deals with the thorny issues of individual ethics and professional responsibility in the context of microcomputers. Because decision-aiding software encourages decision makers to be much more explicit about their goals than they otherwise would be, its use raises questions as to whose goals should be pursued and to what degree. This is a nuts-and-bolts guidebook that will be a valuable tool for practicing attorneys with some knowledge of microcomputers and is recommended reading for legal scholars and law students.

This book can improve the effectiveness of those working within the legal process and in legal policy. It seeks to clarify how the examination of risk levels, time allocation, and other legal policy situations can lead to optimum choices. The principles discussed are amplified by illustrative examples covering such important subjects as right to counsel, plea bargaining, client selection, pretrial release, jury size, crime prevention, delay reduction, and many other controversial and problematic issues of concern to the practicing attorney, the legal scholar, and the legal policymaker. Nagel offers the reader realistic applications of the theories provided, and is unique in his hands-on direct relation of those theories to the decision-making process.

Nagel draws on his experience as a practicing attorney and legal scholar to present a clear and concise discussion of the analytical methods in law which deal with causation and prediction. Within the legal arena, causal analysis explains the factors involved that cause legal policies/decisions to be adopted and the impact a legal policy is likely to have, and why. Predictive analysis is an attempt to forecast the outcome of a legal action and is especially useful for those involved in courtroom procedures. Causation, Prediction, and Legal Analysis is the only book available on this broadly focused subject, encompassing a thorough exposition of both the theory and application of causation and prediction.

The essence of decision-aiding software is that it consists of various forms of microcomputer programming designed to enable users to process a set of (1) goals to be achieved, (2) alternatives available for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive decision-rule. Benefits from using decision-aiding software include (1) being more explicit about goals to be achieved, alternatives available for achieving them, and relations between goals and alternatives; (2) being stimulated to think of more goals, alternatives, and relations than one would otherwise be likely to do; (3) being prepared to handle multiple goals, alternatives, and relations without getting confused and without feeling the need to resort to a single composite goal or a single go/no-go alternative; (4) being encouraged to experiment with changes in the inputs into one's thinking to see how one's conclusions are affected; and (5) being better able to achieve or exceed one's goals when choosing among alternatives or allocating scarce resources.

There are five parts to the book covering: (1) a broad overview of decision-aiding packages, including criteria for evaluating them; (2) approaches that are based on management science and operations research, including linear programming and decision trees; (3) spreadsheet-based software, generally with goals on the columns, alternatives on the rows, relations in the cells, overall totals for each alternative at the far right, and a capability for indicating how the totals would be altered as a result of changes in the inputs; (4) expert systems software including rule-based and knowledge-based expert systems; and (5) general applications of decision-aiding software and a discussion of the increasing utilization of such software.

Decision-aiding software, the underpinning of computer-aided judicial analysis, can facilitate the prediction of how cases are likely to be decided, prescribe decisions that should be reached in such cases, and help administrate more efficiently the court process. It can do so, says Nagel, by listing past cases on each row of a spreadsheet matrix, by listing predictive criteria in the columns, and in general by showing for each factual element the estimated probability of winning a case. The software aggregates the information available and deduces likely outcomes. But it can also prescribe judicial decisions by listing alternatives in the rows, the goals to be achieved in the columns, and by showing relations between alternatives in the cells. By similar means decision-aiding software can also help perform administrative tasks, such as rationally assigning judges or other personnel to cases, and by sequencing cases to reduce the time consumed by each case.

In Part I, Nagel provides an overview of computer-aided analysis and the role of decision-aiding software in the legal process. In the second part he deals with judicial prediction from prior cases and from present facts; and in the third part he emphasizes the prescribing role of judges, particularly in deciding the rules that ought to be applied in civil and criminal procedures. Nagel also covers computer-aided mediation and provides a new perspective on judicial decisions. Then, in Part IV, he treats at length the process of judicial administration and how to improve its efficiency. Of particular interest to court personnel will be the benefits to be derived from reducing delays and in the docketing and sequencing of cases.

An innovative contribution to the literature of political science, this five-part volume explores the four basic theoretical issues in public policy analysis: conceptual theory, theory of knowing, casual theory, and normative analysis. A fifth section addresses future aspects of policy theory. The editors' introduction, which includes specific definitions of relevant terms used throughout the text, provides the reader with a thorough grounding in the subject. An in-depth discussion of the five key elements of policy evaluation that adhere to the editor's basic definition of the subject and an examination of the fine-tuned distinctions among other concepts often used to mean the same thing as public policy analysis provide the reader with more precise understandings. Key characteristics of good policy analysis relating to validity, importance, originality, and feasibility are scrutinized along with other criteria; sources of the elements of policy analysis--goals, policies, and relations--are identified and studied. The five key methodological problems in decision making are explained and the role of decision-aiding software in resource allocation and in dealing with various constraints is considered. Ten chapters written by fourteen experts in the field expand upon various aspects of the four basic issues in such areas as relativity and quantum logic, the argumentation process, policy design, and normative and behavioral theory. This exhaustive study will be required reading for those who identify goals and formulate public policy and for those who assess the outcomes of these goals.

Less fragmented than the author's earlier work, this book synthesizes Nagel's perspective on the field of policy analysis. As the field's principal organizer and leading promoter, one is indebted to Nagel for his energy, enthusiasm and resourcefulness. This volume is itself imbued with such qualities. It covers vast territory, insistently counters the skeptics, and develops original schema for evaluating the work of the field. Furthermore, as vintage Nagel, the book is highly structured, with many definitions, lists, and prenamed series of ideas. The author provides numerous hypothetical examples of his points, worked out in succinct formulas and terse explanations. Nagel is unswervingly convinced of the correctness of the rationalist perspective, and anchors himself firmly in behavioralist political science while accepting the contributions from other social sciences. Not one to qualify a statement or beat around the bush, the author enunciates many guiding principles and values, such as effectiveness, efficiency and equity. Nagel discusses software options for those interested in conducting analysis with microcomputers. He also gives advice on teaching with computers. Important for graduate students and university libraries. Choice The purpose of this work is twofold. First, it attempts to integrate the basic ideas that relate to policy studies. These include the definition of concepts, the establishment of criteria for judging policy studies research, and the clarification of policy goals. Second, the volume proposes to evaluate the methods of policy evaluation themselves, and to assess the field as a whole. Designed to serve as a definitive analysis of policy studies, this volume covers basic concepts, research criteria, societal goals, and policy alternatives. It also examines analytic methods, optimizing, statistics, quasi-experimentation, behavioralism, multicriteria decision making, evaluation, research, legal analysis, and conflicting critiques of the field. It was written for researchers and instructors of public policy studies, and will also assist public policy specialists and others interested in the application of social science and other fields of knowledge to important public policy issues.

How does the Chinese government deal with its social problems and set up its systems of social security, health care, environmental control, population control, and economic development? In this book, Chinese and Western experts analyze the nature of public policymaking in China, specific measures and alternatives, and various methodological approaches. Students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in political science and public administration will find this unique study an invaluable one for understanding the little-known public policy process in China.

This expert analysis opens with two chapters providing background on the study of public policy and political science in China today. Four chapters then define specific policy problems and measures to reform the social security system, health care administration, and environmental control and to promote economic development in relation to decentralization or centralization of government administration. Two chapters describe super-optimizing analysis and solutions in policy problems. The collection closes with an insider's perspective and a frequent visitor's perspective on public policy in China today.

This is one of the very first studies by Chinese and Western experts to examine the current picture of public administration in China. Mills and Nagel provide a general background into the nature of public administration in China, specific reforms in government agencies, personnel administration and compensation, and administrative law. Insiders and frequent visitors evaluate the state of public administration today for scholars, students, and practitioners in public administration and political science.

This unique appraisal opens with a general discussion of public administration in China and the teaching of administrative science. The second section defines basic concepts behind China's administration systems, current reforms, constraints on Chinese bureaucracy and coordination, and administrative law. The third section of the book describes efforts underway to promote a better quality of personnel, to appraise performance more fully, and to reevaluate methods of compensation. In conclusion, insiders to China provide current assessments of the situation in China currently in the field of public administration.

An exciting aspect of contemporary legal scholarship is a concern for law from a global perspective across all legal fields. The book draws upon examples from North America, Western Europe, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. It refers to the basic private law fields of torts, property, contracts, and family law. It also refers to the basic public law fields of constitutional law, administrative law, criminal law, and international law. It analyzes diverse legal policy problems from a perspective that is designed to produce solutions whereby conservatives, liberals, and other major viewpoints can all come out ahead of their best initial expectations simultaneously. Such solutions can be considered an important part of an innovative concept of justice that emphasizes being effective, efficient, and equitable simultaneously, rather than compromising on any of those justice components.

Another exciting aspect of contemporary legal scholarship is a concern for the use of modern technology in the form of microcomputer software that can be helpful in law teaching, practice, and research. Computer-aided instruction can supplement the case method by using what-if analysis to make changes in the goals to be achieved, alternative decisions available for achieving them, the factual relations, and other inputs to see how the decisions might change with changes in those inputs. Computer-aided law practice can be helpful in counseling, negotiation, mediation, case analysis, legal policy evaluation, and advocacy. Computer-aided research can be helpful in testing deductive or statistical models to determine how well they can explain variance across the judicial process or other legal processes.

This volume is a culmination of years of development, and the first to introduce the concepts of superoptimum evaluative and explanatory reasoning. Stuart Nagel's new Quorum book will help academic and practicing attorneys in two important ways. First, by understanding evaluative reasoning, they will gain a better grasp of the appropriate behavior to be adopted if they wish to achieve certain desired goals. Second, by understanding the elements of explanatory reasoning, they will understand how and why decisions are reached.

Evaluative reasoning can take several forms. It can help decision-makers select from among several public policy choices. It can enhance individual decision-making and provide means to allocate scarce resources. It can also assist in advocating and influencing decisions, mediating disputes, representing divergent viewpoints, and in assigning people to specific tasks. Explanatory reasoning, on the other hand, will help explain public policy making, and assist users in generalizing from cases and facts, and in understanding relationships. The purpose of explanatory reasoning is also to explain why superoptimum solutions are infrequently adopted and why they are seldom successfully implemented. The use of both kinds of reasoning, says Nagel, are particularly important to those who want a better understanding and want to improve the legal system.

This book analyzes various important aspects of methodology and substance regarding economic, social, and political policy in Africa directed toward achieving more effective, efficient, and equitable societal institutions. The chapters are authored by experts from within Africa and also from Africa research institutes elsewhere. The book combines practical policy significance with insightful causal and prescriptive generalizations. The emphasis is on the role of governmental decision-making and the important (but secondary) role of the marketplace, social groups, and engineering.

This volume analyzes various important aspects of methodology and substance regarding economic, social and political policy in Africa directed toward achieving more effective, efficient and equitable societal institutions. The chapters are authored by experts from within Africa and also from Africa research institutes elsewhere. It combines practical policy significance with insightful casual and prescriptive generalizations. The emphasis is on the role of governmental decision-making and the important (but secondary) role of the marketplace, social groups and engineering.

This is an insightful overview of what is happening at the cutting edge of professional public policy analysis. Written by a well-known expert, the survey assesses the many and varied aspects of the policy studies discipline. Stuart Nagel has provided an analysis of the profession that will be useful to practitioners and academics, as well as students and teachers, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This survey begins by suggesting ways for professionals to become more effective and interdisciplinary in their approaches to dealing with public policy. The author also analyzes cross-cutting governmental activities and different theoretical perspectives. He points to means for achieving policy goals, for selecting among alternative policies, and to the organizations and institutions that are concerned with public policy. A bibliography notes the most important recent publications dealing with professional developments in the field.

This book analyzes various important aspects of methodology and substance regarding economic, social, and political policy in Asia directed toward achieving more effective, efficient, and equitable societal institutions. The chapters are authored by experts from within Asia and also from Asia research institutes elsewhere. The book combines practical policy significance with insightful causal and prescriptive generalizations. The emphasis is on the role of governmental decision-making and the important (but secondary) role of the marketplace, social groups, and engineering.

This series presents selected research papers dealing with important methodological and theoretical issues in the policy sciences, with research in policy-related disciplines, and applied research on issues in public policy analysis and public management.

The burgeoning of court litigation and the resulting logjams in the judicial system have spawned new ways for attorneys and their clients to resolve disputes quickly and at a lower cost. Alternative dispute resolution is one important way of doing this. Editors Nagel and Mills, along with their contributors, explore the theory and practice of this technique. They demonstrate how to clarify, understand and develop the various options available under alternative dispute resolution, and how to evaluate the probable outcomes. Among the tools available to facilitate dispute resolution are microcomputer-based, rule-based expert systems and, for specific fields of dispute, decision-aiding software.

The editors delineate several ways in which participants in a dispute win or lose. The most desirable are the super-optimum solutions in which all sides come out ahead of their best expectations. They point out that win-win solutions are not as desirable as would seem at first glance since parties only come out ahead relative to their worst expectations. Subject matter for resolution methods include disputes involving family members, neighborhoods, merchants-consumer, management-labor, legislation and foreign countries. Scholars, lawyers and policy-makers will find this book a valuable resource.

Is there a way for people on both sides of a dispute to come out ahead? Yes, says Stuart Nagel, and he calls his method super-optimizing decision making. Instead of expecting both sides to come out ahead of their worst initial expectations, Nagel's super-optimum solutions approach (SOS) allows both to come out ahead of their "best" initial expectations, and to do so simultaneously. Nagel offers readers in all fields of the public sector, with diverse interests and experiences, a clear, well-illustrated introduction to the basic concepts and principles of super-optimized decision making. Emphasizing rule-making and broader policy controversies rather than individual cases of adjudication, and with less reliance on mathematics and statistics than other books on decision-making techniques, Nagel's approach is basically commonsensical and easily grasped. Decision makers in the public sector will find the book fascinating and of special importance in their daily activities. Private-sector executives will find that its approaches can indeed be adapted to their own special concerns.

This work examines the topic of dispute resolution, specifically the multi-criteria approach that seeks to arrive at a conclusion that is mutually beneficial to both sides. Through the use of decision-aiding software, the multi-criteria approach can allow each side to give on various criteria that are not important to it, but are important to the other side. In this way, a super-optimum solution may even be met, in which both sides receive something significantly better than they had expected. Such a result is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, Stuart Nagel points out, in traditional single-dimension dispute resolution.

Nagel and Mills describe the nature of multi-criteria dispute resolution utilizing decision-aiding software. The first part of the book clarifies the general character of computer-aided negotiation, computer-aided mediation, and super-optimizing dispute resolution. Part two guides the reader through the use of Policy/Goal Percentaging (P/G%) decision-aiding software, centering on general decision-making, negotiation, mediation, and prediction of outcomes. Multi-criteria resolution in the context of rule-making and legal policy disputes is the focus of part three, where such matters as determining initial alternatives and criteria, resolving deadlocks, and arriving at super-optimum solutions are discussed. Part four emphasizes dispute resolution in the context of rule-applying and litigation disputes, as well as mediation at the international level and between lawyers and clients. The final part deals with future applications, such as computer-aided mediation and group decision-making with phone modems. The book's combination of decision-aiding software, arbitration-mediation, and super-optimum expansionist decision-making brings a truly innovative approach to the topic of dispute resolution. This volume should be a welcome addition to academic, legal, and public libraries, and a valuable reference work for lawyers, law students, and legal professors and researchers.

This contributed volume offers a summary of the latest ideas and applications concerning decision making software, as applied to administrative decision making and public policy-making. Stuart Nagel, the editor of this work, defines the essence of decision-aiding software to be software that is designed to enable users to process a set of (1) goals to be achieved, (2) alternatives available for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive decision-rule. Containing contributions from both practitioners and theorists, this book should be of immediate value to those professionals involved in the field of public administration. The book is organized in terms of the major fields of public administration, which have been divided into staff/procedural activities, and into line/substantive activities. The first part of the book deals with cross-cutting procedures, including organization theory, policy analysis, and financial management. The second part deals with substantive chapters, including criminal justice, health, environmental-energy, and transportation as administrative fields. The third part of the book involves chapters which combine procedures and substance. It includes developmental policy, with chapters emphasizing the perspectives of people from developing countries toward the relevance of computers and decision-aiding software. It also includes the perspective of people from more developed countries trying to apply policy analysis methods to developmental policy. The third part also deals with public administration education. It emphasizes data banks that are available through telecommunications systems to aid in teaching various aspects of public administration procedures and substance. This book should be of interest to public administrators and scholars of the field.

Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation is the only book of its kind to present aspects of public policy evaluation that relate to economic, technology, social, political, international, and legal problems. Rather than looking at specific narrowly focused programs, this book emphasizes broad-based evaluation theory, study, and application, providing a rich variety of exceptional insights and ideas.

Designed to facilitate integration and coherence, key features in this volume include:

• Systematic evaluation, measuring the policy alternatives available for achieving goals

• Win-win evaluation, processing policy alternatives that can enable conservatives, liberals, and other major viewpoints to all come out ahead of their best initial expectations simultaneously

• Policy evaluation, offering methods, examples, studies, professionalism, perspectives, concepts, trends, substance, theory, applications, dispute resolution, interdisciplinary interaction and bibliographies and applications

The book targets the need for improvement in the methods, processes, and substance of public policy and opens the gate of public policy to be more effective, efficient, and equitable. Policymakers, administrators, analysts, and practitioners alike will find the Handbook a necessary resource of alternative public policies that are placed in context with a direct course to positive results. 

This annual publication deals with how microcomputers and other computers can be applied to improving the explanatory and evaluative roles of modern social science. Each volume contains chapters by experts in political science, psychology, sociology, economics and computer science.