Article: Policy

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A policy is a plan of action to guide decisions and actions. The term may apply to government, private sector organizations and groups, and individuals. The policy process includes the identification of different alternatives, such as programs or spending priorities, and choosing among them on the basis of the impact they will have. Policies in short can be understood as political, management, financial, and administrative mechanisms arranged to reach explicit goals.

In politology the policy cycle is the "life" of how a policy is created and ended. It includes the following stages:

1. Agenda setting
2. Policy formation
3. Decision-making
4. Policy implementation
5. Policy evaluation (continue or terminate)

Policy typology

Policy impacts the ‘real’ world. Government, business, professional and voluntary organisations all have policies, which impact groups of people and individuals.

Different types of policies include:

Distributive policies

Distributive policies extend goods and services to all citizens, and the costs of the policies are shared by all. Government expenditures for public education, highways, and public safety are examples.

Regulatory policies

Regulatory policies are policies that limit discretion of individuals and companies to make decisions freely and are supported by threat of sanctions or a fine.

Constituent policies

Constituent policies create executive power entities or deal with legislative changes.

Misc

Policies are dynamic things, not just static lists of goals or laws. Policy blueprints have to be implemented, often with unexpected results. Social policies are what happens ‘on the ground’ when they are implemented, as well as what happens at the decision making or legislative stage.

Different forms of policies include:

• Official government policy (legislation, guidelines that govern how laws should be put into operation)
• Broad ideas and goals in political manifestos and pamphlets
• A company or organization’s policy on something eg. The equal opportunity policy of a company shows that the company aims to treat all its staff equally.

There is often a gulf between the concepts and goals that inspire policy and ‘real’ policy, the ugly result of compromise. Implementing policies may have unexpected results.

Think tanks are non-governmental organizations that attempt to develop and influence policy.

Types of policy include:

• causal (resp. non-causal)
• deterministic (resp. stochastic, randomized and sometimes non-deterministic)
• index
• memoryless (e.g. non-stationary)
• opportunistic (resp. non-opportunistic)
• stationary (resp. non-stationary)

These qualifiers can be combined, so for example you could have a stationary-memoryless-index policy.

In enterprise architecture for systems design, policy appliances are technical control and logging mechanisms to enforce or reconcile policy (systems use) rules and to ensure accountability in information systems.

Specific cases

In insurance, policies are contracts between insurer and insured used to indemnify (protect) against potential loss from specified perils.

In gambling, policy is a form of an unsanctioned lottery, where players can purchase insurance against a chosen number being picked by a legitimate lottery.

In artificial intelligence planning and reinforcement learning, a policy prescribes a non-empty deliberation (sequence of actions) given a non-empty sequence of states.