Policy Experiments Research Articles

Simulation and Prediction of the Service Quality of China's Private Express Delivery and Its Influencing Factors Based on the System Dynamics Model

With the continuous development of China’s private express delivery, how to improve the service quality and enable private express delivery company to gain a place in the fiercely competitive market has become a major issue faced by the manager. Therefore, we introduce the system dynamics method into the field of service quality evaluation to study the service quality of China’s private express delivery. Through system dynamics modeling, we discover the sensitive factors that affect the service quality of China's private express delivery, namely logistics information technology, staff training, and organization and management capability. According to the results of the sensitivity analysis, policy experiments are conducted to obtain the optimal resource allocation plan. The results show that, if the new investment is regarded as 100%, then the resource allocation plan corresponding to each subsystem is: 37.2% of the new investment should be allocated to the logistics information technology subsystem.

A dozen effective interventions to reduce car use in European cities: Lessons learned from a meta-analysis and transition management

Transitioning to fossil-free transport and reducing car use are necessary to meet European and national climate goals. Cities are promising leverage points to facilitate system transitions by promoting local innovation and policy experimentation. Building on transition management, we developed a knowledge base for the implementation of transition experiments to reduce city-level car use. From screening nearly 800 peer-reviewed studies and case studies, including in-depth analysis of 24 documents that met quality criteria and quantitatively estimated car use reduction, we identify 12 intervention types combining different measures and policy instruments that were effective in reducing car use in European cities. The most effective at reducing overall car use were the Congestion Charge, Parking & Traffic Congrol, and Limited Traffic Zone. Most interventions were led by local government, planned and decided in collaboration with different urban stakeholders. We evaluated the potential of the identified intervention types to be implemented in a pilot study of Lund, Sweden, using three criteria from Transition Management of novelty, feasibility, and suitability, as assessed by interviews with local experts. We recommend three transition experiments to reduce local car use in Lund: Parking and Traffic Control, Workplace Parking Charge, and Mobility Services for Commuters. We suggest practitioners follow our method to identify effective and locally suitable interventions to reduce car use, and future research quantify the effectiveness of interventions to reduce car use using the standardised outcome measure of daily passenger kilometres travelled by car.

Consent Requirements for Testing Health Policies: An Intercontinental Comparison of Expert Opinions.

Individual informed consent is a central requirement for clinical research on human subjects, yet whether and how consent requirements should apply to health policy experiments (HPEs) remains unclear. HPEs test and evaluate public health policies prior to implementation. We interviewed 58 health experts in Tanzania, Bangladesh and Germany on informed consent requirements for HPEs. Health experts across all countries favored a strong evidence base, prior information to the affected populations, and individual consent for ‘risky’ HPEs. Differences pertained to individual risk perception, how and when consent by group representatives should be obtained and whether HPEs could be treated as health policies. The study adds to representative consent options for HPEs, yet shows that more research is needed in this field – particularly in the present Covid-19 pandemic which has highlighted the need for HPEs nationally and globally.

Much ado about very little: The dubious connection between ethnic minority business policy and ethnic minority entrepreneurship

AbstractThis article presents a historical reprise of 40 years of policy interest in ethnic minority businesses in the UK. It contrasts the pronouncements of policymakers with the reality of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Such an exercise is surprisingly rare given the activism of policymakers in this arena and growing scholarly interest in this field. Our historical overview is informed by a novel research method that plots references to ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the British Houses of Parliament. Though the UK has been the site of some interesting policy experiments on ethnic minority entrepreneurship, their impact has been slight when set against the context of broader political‐economic change.

Estimating the health effects of environmental mixtures using principal stratification

The control of ambient air quality in the United States has been a major public health success since the passing of the Clean Air Act, with particulate matter (PM) reductions resulting in an estimated 160 000 premature deaths prevented in 2010 alone. Currently, public policy is oriented around lowering the levels of individual pollutants and this focus has driven the nature of much epidemiological research. Recently, attention has been given to viewing air pollution as a complex mixture and to developing a multi‐pollutant approach to controlling ambient concentrations. We present a statistical approach for estimating the health impacts of complex environmental mixtures using a mixture‐altering contrast, which is any comparison, intervention, policy, or natural experiment that changes a mixture's composition. We combine the notion of mixture‐altering contrasts with sliced inverse regression, propensity score matching, and principal stratification to assess the health effects of different air pollution chemical mixtures. We demonstrate the application of this approach in an analysis of the health effects of wildfire PM air pollution in the Western US.

Embedding a Proof-of-Concept Test in an At-Scale National Policy Experiment: Greater Policy Learning But at What Cost to Statistical Power? The Social Security Administration’s Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND)

A randomized experiment that measures the impact of a social policy in a sample of the population reveals whether the policy will work on average with universal application. An experiment that includes only the subset of the population that volunteers for the intervention generates narrower “proof-of-concept” evidence of whether the policy can work for motivated individuals. Both forms of learning carry value, yet evaluations rarely combine the two designs. The U.S. Social Security Administration conducted an exception, the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND). This article uses BOND to examine the statistical power implications and potential gains in policy learning—relative to costs—from combining volunteer and population-representative experiments. It finds that minimum detectable effects of volunteer experiments rise little when one adds a population-representative experiment, but those of a population-representative experiment double or quadruple with the addition of a volunteer experiment.

Creative re-uses: The promises and challenges of temporary land use in Calgary

Temporary land-uses (TLUs), especially on vacant land in cities, is a topic of increasing attention in Urban Studies. More specifically there is a focus on how TLUs are increasingly an area of experimentation in urban planning and policy, in part because they have been shown to be a catalyst for urban revitalization. In this paper, we explore TLUs in Calgary, Alberta. Calgary provides a noteworthy case-study for several reasons. Firstly, the city has experienced a severe recession since 2014, and while policymakers have made some effort to allow for more flexible land-uses, this has not been presented as a means to urban revitalization. Secondly, despite a concern in the creative cities' literature on the importance of creative spaces for a more vital form of urbanism, issues of land-use remain largely underexplored. In Calgary the existing legal structures around TLUs in Calgary are an important limitation on their more widespread adoption, but in this study, we also investigated local attitudes towards TLUs to see if that too was having a limiting impact in Calgary. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants, comprising a mix of local policymakers, officials, and interested citizens. We found that all the informants agreed that TLUs positively stimulate the local economy and urban life. Moreover, all agreed that government regulation and misunderstandings about the legal meaning of the word ‘temporary’ are significant barriers to increasing the adoption of TLUs across the city. However, we also found there was a clear divide between the two groups. One group viewed land-use bylaws positively, and saw it as a necessary factor for ensuring safe and quality urban development. The other group viewed land-use bylaws negatively, and the hindrance to temporary land-use adoption as yet another case of how land-use bylaws contributed to a range of urban problems. It became evident that this division is having a limiting impact on TLU adoption in Calgary and this division has to be addressed if TLUs are to expand beyond their currently limited adoption. Moreover, we found the literature on TLUs fails to capture a problematic local understanding of TLU in Calgary. The greatest barrier in Calgary appears to be a concern about the possible misperceptions, and political implications, which surrounded previous efforts to have temporary-land uses within the city.

Continental metropolitanization: Chongqing and the urban origins of China’s Belt and Road Initiative

ABSTRACT This article explores the urban dimensions of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in relation to the dialectical movement between global infrastructural expansion and urban intensification in China’s west. Through an investigation of a series of nationally-endorsed policy experiments implemented in the late 2000s and early 2010s in the provincial-level municipality of Chongqing, the article traces the origins of the BRI to a state-led effort to urbanize the western interior. Lacking the direct access to the global economy enjoyed by China’s coastal cities, Chongqing sought to accelerate urban expansion by building infrastructural linkages to the Eurasian continent and positioning itself as an emerging global city. This strategy of “continental metropolitanization” later matured into the BRI, which intersected with the domestic urban landscape at three scales: metropolitan expansion of urban areas, regional integration across a network of western metropolises, and continental interconnection between China’s western region and the rest of Eurasia.

Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach

Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of policy experiments, which manifested itself in multiple value conflicts. To deal with these conflicts, stakeholders adopted different strategies: colonization, compromising, prioritization, short-cutting, organizational enmeshing, and pilotification. The results show a shift from exclusive top-down strategies to inclusive multi-value strategies over time.

Policy experimentation with impact financing: a systematic review of research on social impact bonds

ABSTRACT Social impact bonds (SIB) have become a novel and attractive policy tool to assist with service delivery to vulnerable groups. Since the first SIB in 2010 in the United Kingdom, hundreds of projects have been adopted, implemented, and continue to be developed around the world. A broad observation from current research concludes that there is a lack of consistent evidence on research foci and orientations with regard to this innovative policy tool. In the context of the Asia-Pacific region, research on SIBs is largely non-existent. Moreover, research from Asia-Pacific contexts is primarily focused on the (financial) product features of impact financing, at the expense of studying the process innovation aspect of SIBs in service delivery. This contrasts with research from European and North American SIBs, which exhibit a relatively heightened interest on issues in service delivery process and their impact on performance measurement, evidence auditing and evaluation, and accountability to service recipients versus investor returns. As policy experimentation continues with SIBs in the Asia-Pacific region, several key considerations remain vital and require future scholarly attention.

Experimentation, policy learning, and China's education reforms

Policy experimentation (PE) describes a policy process in which local actors generate and test innovative policy options, with the capacity for diffusion and injection into national policymaking for reforms. Using China's new National College Entrance Examination (Gao Kao) reform as a case study, the study examines how PE encourages local innovation, enhanced participation of policy networks and learning-mediated diffusion through the constructive interplay of coercive, mimetic and normative forces. It constitutes an integral part of the country's adaptive governance to effectively involve multi-level governments and actors for collaborative policy adoption, modification and implementation.

A small service enterprise: system dynamics study

The dynamic complexity is growing continuously due to the exponential growth in technological innovations. The managers in a business setting find it hard to manage a problem as it does not come alone; it is connected to another set of subsystems. This could be the reason why the list of Fortune 500 companies keeps changing. The mortality rate of the small and medium enterprises in India is also on the rise. The dynamic complexity is hard to handle and requires a radically different approach. System dynamics has been widely used to capture dynamic complexity due to its ability to capture nonlinear relations, delays, interrelations, and interaction among all the elements in a system. A case study was conducted in a service organisation employing system dynamics methodology. It has been systematically demonstrated through policy experimentation how managers fall prey to 'quick-fixes' in real world setting.

Regulatory sandbox for innovation: International evidence and implications for Vietnam

The development of digital technology, innovative products, services and new business models promises to play an important role in ensuring economic growth and delivering social benefits. However, the development of these products, services and new business models is often delayed or prevented due to lack of regulatory framework. This study aims to present issues related to innovation promotion policies in the world: innovation hubs, policy experiments, and regulatory sandbox, as well as practices in Vietnam. The study has shown that the sandbox is a valuable tool to promote innovation across countries, especially in the Fintech sector. However, the sandbox is not the only one to promote innovation. In other cases, innovation hubs perform more efficiently promoting innovation than other strategies. In Vietnam, many new products and services (car booking apps and Mobile Money) have been allowed to operate as part of the new industrialization and modernization under a unique mechanism known as "a pilot". The sandbox is currently under development for a Decree proposition and has only been applied to Fintech solutions in the banking sector.

Booms and Busts in Chinese Agricultural Markets: An Agent‐Based Model

This paper uses agent‐based modelling to study the frequent booms and busts in Chinese agricultural markets. First, an artificial agricultural commodity market consisting of heterogeneous agents, such as producers, consumers, and speculators, is built. A numerical simulation suggests that speculation can cause large price fluctuations via nonlinear price dynamics. Then, parameters are estimated by the simulated method of moments using garlic and ginger price data in China from 2006Q2 to 2018Q3. The estimation yields a statistically significant speculative behavior parameter, supporting speculators’ existence. Based on the well‐estimated model, a low‐cost policy experiment aiming at market stabilization is carried out. The essence of this policy is to release the theoretical steady state of the estimated model as the government‐guided price to producers. The guided price, even partially followed by producers, can reduce simulated price variances and weaken speculators’ negative impact on market stability. Robustness tests show that the effect of policy experiment is robust under a 20% change in any parameter value or a 5% change in the guided price.

Wandering astray: Teenagers' choices of schooling and crime

We build and estimate a dynamic model of teenagers' choices of schooling and crime, incorporating four factors that may contribute to the different paths taken by different teenagers: heterogeneous endowments, unequal opportunities, uncertainties about one's own ability, and contemporaneous shocks. We estimate the model using administrative panel data from Chile that link school records with juvenile criminal records. Counterfactual policy experiments suggest that, for teenagers with disadvantaged backgrounds, interventions that combine mild improvement in their schooling opportunities with free tuition (by adding 157 USD per teenager‐year to the existing high school voucher) would lead to an 11% decrease in the fraction of those ever arrested by age 18 and a 13% increase in the fraction of those consistently enrolled throughout primary and secondary education.

Becoming ‘Smart’: An Examination of Infrastructure Canada's Smart City Challenge as a Public Policy Experiment and Research Instrument

Becoming ‘Smart’: An Examination of Infrastructure Canada's Smart City Challenge as a Public Policy Experiment and Research Instrument

Learning from the Pandemic Monetary Policy Experiment

Learning from the Pandemic Monetary Policy Experiment

Independent Regulators and Financial Stability: Evidence from Gubernatorial Campaigns and a Progressive Era Policy Experiment

Independent Regulators and Financial Stability: Evidence from Gubernatorial Campaigns and a Progressive Era Policy Experiment

Pragmatism or Politicism: Local Officials’ Decision Making in Social Policy Experimentation

Pragmatism or Politicism: Local Officials’ Decision Making in Social Policy Experimentation

Encouraging Community Action Against Teacher Absenteeism: A Mass Media Experiment in Rural Uganda

Chronic teacher absenteeism is widespread in Uganda, with approximately one-third of public school teachers absent on any given day. Absenteeism and other problems that arise in Uganda’s public education system are often attributed to a lack of public oversight and parental involvement. In an effort to develop a scalable method of encouraging community engagement on this issue, the present study assesses the extent to which entertainment-education videos increase willingness among Ugandans to take action against absenteeism. Working in collaboration with Ugandan screenwriters and local actors, we developed video dramatisations that depicted the problem of absenteeism and how parents mobilised to address it. We assess the persuasive effects of these dramatisations both under lab-like conditions, to gauge immediate effects, and in the field, to gauge effects two months and eight months after a placebo-controlled media campaign attended by over 10,000 Ugandans in 112 villages. Although the persuasive effects are weaker in the field than the lab setting, the former remain substantial even after eight months. The demonstrated ability of entertainment-education to change public views on this issue sets the stage for policy experiments that test whether entertainment-education campaigns have downstream effects on absenteeism and public school performance more generally.