Call for papers: "Applications of AHP/ANP in Government Policy and Decision Making"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Management and Decision Making.

The capacity of a country to innovate and create new products and processes plays a dominant and decisive role in the nations' ability to achieve global economic competitiveness. More effective approaches to implementing homeland security, technological advances in the delivery of health care and energy policy, and better ways to protect democracy and human rights, to name but a few, are central to achieving this economic competitiveness and prosperity. Sound government policies and effective decision making play a critical role in reaching the full potential of globalisation and economic prosperity.

The purpose of this special issue is to collect a high-quality selection of contemporary research articles on AHP/ANP in government policy and decision making. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and its generalisation, the analytical network process (ANP), are structured techniques for organising and analysing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology. These methods are particularly effective for group decision making scenarios and therefore have been used around the world in a wide variety of decision situations including government policy and decision making. At the government level, rather than prescribing a "correct" solution, AHP and ANP help policy makers and decision makers find a compromising and satisfactory solution that best suits the stakeholders.

AHP and ANP provide a comprehensive and rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying the evaluation criteria, for relating those evaluation criteria to overall goals and for evaluating alternative solutions. We are particularly interested in articles on applications of AHP/ANP in government policy and decision making that also make theoretical contributions.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Information security
• Homeland security
• E-government service quality
• Global warming
• Military applications and defence
• Energy and the environment
• Immigration
• Foreign policy
• Education
• Ethics
• Healthcare
• Civil rights
• Economy and public finance
• Technology
• Telecommunications
• Industrial strategies
• Trade
• Transport
• Job creation
• Gender and politics

  

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 30 December 2014
Reviewer reports: 30 March 2015
Revised papers submission: 30 May 2015
Manuscripts acceptance: 30 July 2015