Calls for Papers

Call for Papers: Decision Analysis for Policy Interventions Using Nonexperimental Evidence

Motivation and Scope

Many consequential public policy decisions must be made in settings where randomized experiments are infeasible, unethical, or impractical. Examples include environmental regulation, public health interventions, safety and security policies, technology governance, and large-scale social and infrastructure programs. In such contexts, decision makers must rely on observational data, quasiexperimental designs, expert judgment, and mechanistic or structural models—often in the presence of substantial uncertainty and disagreement about causal effects.

This Special Issue of Decision Analysis focuses on how decision-analytic methods can support sound policy and regulatory choices when evidence is nonexperimental. The emphasis is not on causal inference for its own sake, but on how imperfect, incomplete, and uncertain evidence should be represented and used to inform decisions, trade-offs, and intervention choices consistent with normative decision-analysis principles.

The Special Issue seeks contributions that clarify how causal uncertainty, model uncertainty, and evidentiary limitations should be incorporated into decision models and how such uncertainty affects robust, adaptive, or optimal policy recommendations—particularly in forward-looking regulatory and governance settings.

Topics of Interest

The Special Issue invites research papers on a broad range of topics related to decision analysis for policy interventions using nonexperimental evidence, including, but not limited to:

• Decision-relevant causal evaluation when randomized controlled trials are not available, including the use of observational studies, quasiexperiments, and natural experiments in policy analysis.
• Representation and propagation of causal and structural uncertainty in decision trees, influence diagrams, dynamic decision models, or related frameworks.
• Robust, adaptive, and precautionary policy decisions under uncertainty about causal structure, effect size, external validity, or transportability across populations or settings.
• Sensitivity analysis and value-of-information analysis for policy decisions informed by nonexperimental evidence.
• Integration of expert judgment and empirical evidence, including methods for handling expert disagreement and competing causal or structural models.
• Decision analysis under model misspecification, partial identification, or deep uncertainty, and implications for policy robustness.
• Rigorous decision analysis to support future regulatory and governance decisions, including how uncertainty and evidence limitations should shape standards, thresholds, and policy design.
• Optimal timing and sequencing of interventions under uncertainty, including issues of delay, reversibility, learning, and adaptive management.
• Case studies and applications demonstrating best practices in using nonexperimental evidence to support real policy decisions in areas such as public health, environmental protection, safety and security, infrastructure resilience, technology policy, and sociotechnical systems.

Submissions should be clearly grounded in normative decision analysis, with explicit attention to decisions, objectives, trade-offs, and uncertainty. Papers that focus solely on statistical or causal inference methods without clear relevance to decision making are outside the scope of this Special Issue.

Submission Guidelines and Timeline

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the standard author guidelines for Decision Analysis and submitted through the journal’s online submission system. When submitting, authors should select “SI: DA for Policy Interventions Using Non-Experimental Evidence.”

Timeline:

• Manuscript submission deadline: September 30, 2026
• First-round reviews/decisions: December 15, 2026
• Final revised manuscripts due: February 15, 2027
• Special Issue completion target: March–April 2027

Manuscripts will be reviewed as they are received.

Additional Information

For questions about the Special Issue, please contact:

Tony Cox
University of Colorado—Denver
[email protected]

Vicki Bier
University of Wisconsin—Madison
[email protected]

Allison Reilly
University of Maryland—College Park
[email protected]

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Have an idea for a special issue? Feel free to reach out to the managing editor:

Annie Stevenson
[email protected]