INFORMS Open Forum

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to share a new Call for Papers for a forthcoming special issue of Decision Analysis: Decision Analysis for Policy Interventions Using Nonexperimental Evidence

Guest Editors:

* Tony Cox (University of Colorado Denver)

* Vicki Bier (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

* Allison Reilly (University of Maryland)

Many of today's most important policy decisions-including those involving public health, environmental management, cybersecurity, national security, transportation, energy, and emerging technologies-must be made without the benefit of randomized experiments. Instead, decision makers increasingly rely on observational data, natural experiments, historical evidence, expert judgment, machine learning, and causal inference methods. This special issue seeks high-quality research that advances decision analysis methods and applications for evaluating, designing, and improving policy interventions using nonexperimental evidence. We welcome methodological, computational, empirical, and application-oriented contributions from researchers across operations research, economics, statistics, public policy, engineering, management science, and related disciplines.

If your research addresses decision making under uncertainty using observational or other nonexperimental data, I encourage you to consider submitting your work. Please also share this call with colleagues and collaborators who may be interested. 

The full Call for Papers is available here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/deca.2026.ed.v23.n3?af=R  The submission deadline is September 30, 2026

Thank you for your continued support of Decision Analysis. We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Best regards,

Jun Zhuang

Editor-in-Chief

Decision Analysis