Budget Allocation Process Research Articles

Food scares, advertising, and the demand for meat cuts in Great Britain

Retail demand systems for 19 different cuts of meat for beef, lamb, pork, bacon and poultry in Great Britain are estimated from monthly time series of consumer expenditure from 1989–2000 using a two stage budget allocation process and an LA/AIDS specification. The unconditional expenditure, own and cross price elasticities are derived for the individual meat cuts. The impact of adverse publicity from meat scares, especially BSE, and of positive publicity through consumer promotion and advertising are incorporated into the modelling. Meat scares produced a reallocation of consumer spending from red to white meats during the 1990s. The impact of species-based advertising was shown to have complex spillover effects both within and between meat species, and the response of consumer demand to advertising was considerably less than to adverse publicity.

Benefits of Information Integration in Budget Planning for Pavement Management

The budget-allocation process in pavement management occurs at several levels of decision making. In normal practice, the central level is concerned with the allocation of the budget to regional agencies to improve the health of the overall road network, while the regions are responsible for the programming and scheduling of road maintenance in their respective networks. The information processed at different management levels differs, and information at one level may not be readily available to the other. As a result, the maintenance funds allocated by central management to regional highway agencies may not be best used. A budgetallocation procedure based on artificial-intelligence agents is presented; it takes into account information integration between the central and regional management levels by using multiagent systems. Agents are used to facilitate the interaction between decision makers at the two management levels and thus provide a means for vertical information integration. A hypothetical problem containing a two-level funds-allocation structure consisting of a central-level management and three regional highway agencies is investigated. Each regional agency has different road network profiles with different local-level objectives. A genetic algorithm is used as the optimization tool in the decision-making process carried out by each agent. The results are compared with conventional allocation approaches and a two-stage optimization approach. It is shown that, with better integration of information at the different management levels, the resulting budget-allocation strategy produces greater maintenance-cost savings for a given target level of pavement performance.

Bargaining in Legislatures: An Experimental Investigation of Open versus Closed Amendment Rules

We investigate the differential effects of open versus closed amendment rules within the framework of a distributive model of legislative bargaining. The data show that there are longer delays in distributing benefits and a more egalitarian distribution of benefits under the open amendment rule, the proposer gets a larger share of the benefits than coalition members under both rules, and play converges toward minimal winning coalitions under the closed amendment rule. However, there are important quantitative differences between the theoretical model underlying the experiment (Baron and Ferejohn 1989) and data, as the frequency of minimal winning coalitions is much greater under the closed rule (the theory predicts minimal winning coalitions under both rules for our parameter values) and the distribution of benefits between coalition members is much more egalitarian than predicted. The latter are consistent with findings from shrinking pie bilateral bargaining game experiments in economics, to which we relate our results. O ne of the fundamental questions legislatures deal with is how to allocate government resources between constituencies that have different and sometimes conflicting preferences. The formal rules under which this legislative bargaining process takes place are universally recognized to play a major role in the budget allocation process, both within the specialized standing committees assigned to draft legislation and within the parent legislature itself. Although no legislative bargaining model can fully capture the complex nature of this bargaining process, at a minimum it is important to distinguish between situations where a proposal can be amended many times before being brought to a vote (open amendment rule) and situations where the agenda setter exercises greater control and manages to bring unamended proposals to the floor (closed amendment rule). A good deal of theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to understanding the basis for legislatures ceding substantial authority to specialized standing committees and to the impact of the amendment

On cell biology, proteomics and career decisions.

On cell biology, proteomics and career decisions.

Budgeting for Facility Maintenance and Repair. I: Methods and Models

Whether in the public or private sector, facility maintenance and repair is less tangible, less glamorous, and less immediate than many other uses of an organization's limited resources. The engineers who manage and operate large physical plants must be vigilant as they compete in the annual budget allocation process. This paper, the first of two in a series, reports on the variety and relative acceptance of methodologies for estimating facility maintenance and repair funding requirements. Four bases are outlined for budget-level estimating: (1) The physical plant's initial cost or replacement value; (2) formulas grounded in other quantifiable attributes of the plant, (3) life-cycle analysis of each facility's systems and components; and (4) assessment of the facility's current or projected physical condition. Most importantly, a description and comparison of 18 available maintenance and repair budgeting models is provided. Each description includes an explanation of the mechanisms through which the model functions, the degree to which each estimating basis is applied within the model's construct, and any limitations to the model's implementation by a prospective user.

WHO proposes radical change to budget allocation process

WHO proposes radical change to budget allocation process

Developing a databased budget allocation strategy: The University of Arizona Library experience

The library literature provides numerous accounts of the efforts made in libraries ‐ particularly academic libraries ‐ to develop a formula for allocating the materials budget. Explains how, at the University of Arizona, a group of librarians responsible for information resources development and preservation took on the task of leading the library in all the activities associated with collection development. The design of a strategy for allocating the information access budget based on data regarding the needs of the library users is a crucial portion of this assignment. The resulting information will be used to guide the budget allocation process. Describes the steps involved in the first phase of the project and summarizes the plan for the next two phases.

Institutions for global environmental change: The UN Commission on Sustainable Development: a non-governmental perspective

The Brundtland Report (1987) is always worth re-reading. From p 316 onwards, the Brundtland Commission sought to establish leadership and coordination within the UN. Using diplomatic language, it was clearly irritated by the failure of most, if not all, UN initiatives to promote sustainability and to establish high-level centres of leadership and expertise linked to the much manipulated programme and budget allocation process. The Commission saw the need for a powerful supervisory function for all this coordination at the very apex of the UN. The Commission allocated a UN Board of Sustainable Development (p 318) with the capacity to assess, advise, assist and report on progress made and needed on sustainable development. The Board should be chaired by the Secretary General with supreme powers to create interagency commitment and coordination to sustainable development. In the event, the 1992 Rio conference fudged it. The Commission on Sustainable Development is a lower rank body with limited powers to coerce and cajole the cumbersome UN process. Whether it can manage to bring the 180-odd states into line remains to be seen. Yet it is in place and countries are reporting. What remains inevitably unclear is whether the UN system as a whole really knows what sustainable development actually means for democracy and civil rights and what it takes to achieve it. Tim O'Riordan and Andrew Jordan

Linking budgets to desired academic outputs at Dalhousie University.

In 1993, faced with continuing university budget reductions and dissatisfaction with the budget-allocation process, the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University undertook a financial planning process. The goal was to develop a new resource-allocation model to better link academic budget support to desired academic outputs over a three-year period. Department heads categorized academic outputs (e.g., teaching, research, administration, and subcategories of these), determined their relative values (expressed as percentages of the total department budget to be projected), and identified acceptable units of measuring the outputs (e.g., for teaching in the first and second years of medical school, the unit was the number of teaching hours). When dollar values were assigned to the units of measure, the new model was used to calculate budget allocations for all departments. However, many departments showed large negative shifts in their budgets; these shifts were too large to be achieved within three years because of departments' contractual obligations. Therefore, a practical limit in budget shift was determined. This adjustment permitted a three-year projection of academic budgets to be made for each department. The use of the resource-allocation model has achieved the Faculty's goal by creating a better rationalization of budgets to academic outputs, but carries the risk that departments might abandon essential but "undervalued" academic activities.

Discipline cost indices and their applications

Differences in institutional reporting and accounting often reduce the comparability in expenditure data among institutions. This particularly affects interinstitutional comparisons of discipline unit costs, that is, expenditures per credit hour or expenditures per weighted credit hour. To overcome this comparability problem, discipline cost indices have been developed to permit accurate interinstitutional comparisons of relative costs among disciplines. This paper documents how discipline cost indices have been derived, using expenditure data collected from five peer institutions, and how these indices have been implemented in a research university's budget allocation process. Institutional researchers and academic budget planners are the intended audience.

Knowledge support systems for 'smarter' pricing and resource allocation

The role of knowledge support in decision-making is examined. An architecture for knowledge support for product pricing and resource allocation at the tactical or management control decision-making level in companies is presented. It is a hybrid of a decision support system and an expert system. Two concrete systems devised to implement this approach are described. One is Price-Strat, system for tactical pricing. The other is TAPS (targeted allocation of promotional spending), which makes managers to look at the total budget allocation process. It is emphasized that Price-Strat and TAPS are first attempts at providing such knowledge support and leave much room for improvement through further research. >