Details
Traditional MCDM and interactive EMO methods use preferences elicited directly from the participating stakeholders within the decision support process. However, these stakeholder preferences may or may not align with the social preferences that members of the public hold.
Furthermore, there is often resistance from policy actor stakeholders to contribute their own preferences and judgements to the EMO/MCDM process.
As a result, traditional EMO/MCDM is not used as often as it might otherwise be.
One possibility is to use preferences elicited from members of the public taking a social perspective as citizens (as opposed to a personal perspective as private consumers) and to develop a new protocol to incorporate these into a formal EMO/MCDM process for use in public policy decision making.
This PhD will explore the possibility of such an approach and test it in a real-world case study in public health.
Julian Cox, the Assistant Director of Research at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is an external advisor to the PhD project.
Aim and Objectives
Aim: to explore methods of incorporating public preferences into public health policy decision making using an evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) or multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach
Objectives:
- Review and assess how decision support tools based on traditional EMO and MCDM could be adapted to
- incorporate pre-existing public preferences external to the proximal EMO or MCDM stakeholders
- Design new or adapted EMO/MCDM protocol or methods to do so
- Apply these to a relevant problem in public health
Funding source: Division of Population Health (previously ScHARR) matched funding towards the Policy Modelling for Health project of the Population Health Improvement UK Network (PHI-UK)
Supervisors:
Aki Tsuchiya: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/staff/academic/aki-tsuchiya
Robin Purshouse: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/eee/people/academic-staff/robin-purshouse
How to apply:
Please complete a University Postgraduate Research Application form available here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd/apply
Please clearly state the title of the studentship, the main supervisor (Aki Tsuchiya) and select ‘School of Medicine and Population Health' as the department.
You will also need to include:
- a draft outline of your proposed PhD study, in line with the research themes described above, of approximately 500 words
- a covering letter explaining why you wish to apply for this studentship.
- a copy of your CV.
- a good master’s degree (merit or distinction) in operational research, quantitative psychology, economics, engineering, or related field.
Start date: 1st October 2025
References
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Multi-Criteria Evaluation. Sustainability 2019, 11, 5746. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11205746
Gu, Y., Lancsar, E., Ghijben, P., Butler, J. R., & Donaldson, C. (2015). Attributes and weights in health care priority
setting: a systematic review of what counts and to what extent. Social Science & Medicine, 146, 41-52.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953615301477
McNamara, S., Holmes, J., Stevely, A. K., & Tsuchiya, A. (2020). How averse are the UK general public to inequalities
in health between socioeconomic groups? A systematic review. The European Journal of Health Economics, 21(2),
275-285. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10198-019-01126-2
Purshouse RC, Deb K, Mansor MM, Mostaghim S, Wang, R. A review of hybrid evolutionary multiple criteria decision
making methods. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2014; art. no. 6900368.
Purshouse, Robin C; McAlister, John; Multi-objective optimisation for social cost benefit analysis: An allegory,
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, 2013, 726-740.
Wild Thomas B., Reed Patrick M., Loucks Daniel P., Mallen-Cooper Martin, Jensen Erland D. Balancing Hydropower
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Planning and Management 2019;145(2). https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0001036