Calls for Papers

Call for Papers: Global Perspectives on Advances in Decision Analysis for Risk and Security

Motivation and Scope

This Special Issue calls for original contributions on the theme of Advances in Decision Analysis for Risk and Security: Global Perspectives. The theme reflects a shared interest among decision scientists in strengthening the connection between decision-analytic theory and the practical work of managing risk and security around the world. This interest is not confined to one region or one type of institution. It spans different countries, different economies, and different institutional settings, and the Special Issue is meant to bring these perspectives together in one place.

Submissions are welcome from researchers and practitioners anywhere in the world. Every submission will go through the same review process, and we are especially glad to receive work that brings perspectives not yet well represented in the decision analysis literature.

Submissions to this Special Issue should be clearly grounded in normative decision analysis. We are looking for papers that give explicit attention to decisions, objectives, trade-offs, and uncertainty, rather than treat these as background details. Papers that develop new theoretical results are welcome. Papers built around real applications are equally welcome, as long as they are organized around actual decisions and show how decision analysis helped shape or resolve them.

Manuscripts whose primary contribution is a statistical technique or a causal inference method, with the decision problem serving only as motivating context, fall outside the scope of this Special Issue. Similarly, manuscripts that characterize a risk in detail, without extending the analysis to a decision or course of action, are not well suited to this call. The guiding criterion is straightforward: upon reading the paper, a reviewer should be able to identify the decision at stake and understand how the analysis informs it, rather than be left with only a measurement or an estimate.

Topics of Interest

The Special Issue is organized around the following broad themes. Most themes are intended for theoretical and methodological contributions. One theme (decision analysis for security and resilience) will also consider application papers, but only where the papers present clear methodological breakthroughs rather than straightforward case studies.

• Foundations of decision theory and utility theory
• Risk analysis and decision making under uncertainty, including Bayesian decision analysis
• Behavioral and cognitive foundations of decision analysis
• Multicriteria and group decision analysis
• Game theory and strategic decision modeling
• AI-assisted and human-AI collaborative decision support
• Decision analysis for security and resilience

This list is meant to show the range of the Special Issue rather than to limit it. Authors who are uncertain whether their work fits the scope are welcome to contact the guest editor before submission.

Submission Guidelines and Timeline

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the standard author guidelines of Decision Analysis and submitted through the journal’s online submission system. Authors should select the Special Issue option corresponding to “SI: Advances in Decision Analysis for Risk and Security: Global Perspectives” at the time of submission. Papers will be reviewed following the journal’s usual double-anonymous review process, and manuscripts will be evaluated as they arrive rather than held until the deadline.

Timeline:

• Manuscript submission deadline: January 31, 2027
• First-round reviews and decisions: April 2027
• Final revised manuscripts due: June 2027
• Special Issue completion target: July–August 2027

Authors are encouraged to submit well before the deadline, since early submissions allow more time for revision and strengthen the chance of inclusion in the Special Issue.

Additional Information

For questions about the scope of the Special Issue, the submission process, or anything else related to this call, please contact the guest editors directly.

• Naraphorn Paoprasert, Kasetsart University: [email protected]
• Chen Wang, Tsinghua University: [email protected]

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Call for Proposals: Navigating Nonstationarity – Decision Analysis for the 21st Century

To what extent does a hidden assumption of stationary dynamics underlie many decision analyses? And what do we do when that assumption isn’t warranted?

No-analog futures, such as those induced by climate change and other large-scale system changes, present profound challenges for decision makers and the decision analysts who advise them. These changes affect nearly every industry, government, and community across the globe, providing grave challenges, but also opportunities for innovation. Without past experience to guide them, decision makers must grapple with assessing the impact of unprecedented future changes, the effectiveness of different—sometimes deeply novel—decision options, and the need to meet a wide range of goals.

These large-scale system changes present profound challenges for decision analysts as well: systems are nonstationary; timeframes of interest are very long; trade-offs across time need to be considered; multiple objectives may be involved; there may be many actors who influence the system and many interested parties who are affected by the system; there may be no single decision maker; the full set of decision objectives may be opaque; and deep uncertainty may prevail. Do we have the decision analytical tools we need, and do we know how to apply them effectively to these decision challenges?

This Special Issue of Decision Analysis will explore the ways in which the field of decision analysis can advance the methods and applications needed to support decisions that affect and are affected by climate change and large-scale environmental changes. We are interested in topics that address a range of environmental changes, including climate mitigation actions to reduce greenhouse gases, adaptation to the impacts of climate changes, disaster risk management, community and systems resilience, environmental and pollution management, and integrated decision making that accounts for portfolios of decisions that consider climate and environmental changes. We are interested in a broad range of research articles using methodologies typically published in Decision Analysis, as well as articles that advance cutting-edge, evidence-based thinking that integrates environmental change science with decision-analytic methods. For more details on the types of papers that are likely to be considered within this scope, please see the recent editorial at /doi/10.1287/deca.2020.0408.

We are soliciting letters of intent. The letter of intent should contain:

• A suggested title for the proposed paper
• An abstract of the topic (300–600 words)
• A proposed timeline for submission (ideally 3–12 months after the invitation)

Letters of intent can be submitted via email as a PDF to [email protected]. Questions about the Special Issue can also be directed to this email address.

Based on the letters of intent, we will invite a selection of authors to write full manuscripts. The selection of papers will depend on the quality of the abstract as well as on the composition of the Special Issue as a whole. If your paper is not invited for this Special Issue, you may still submit your paper to Decision Analysis or other journals.

Timeline:

• Letters of intent due: February 1, 2027
• Invitations proffered by: March 1, 2027
• Manuscripts due: rolling, preferably by August 31, 2027
• Manuscripts will be published online as they are accepted
• We aim to publish the Special Issue by June 2028

Guest editors:

• Michael C. Runge, U.S. Geological Survey
• Melissa A. Kenney, University of Minnesota
• Thomas S. Palley, Georgetown University
• Anna M. Tucker, U.S. Geological Survey

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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]