Awarding Health: Contracts at the National Institutes of a Sensitivity Analysis of the Critical Parameters

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) developed an initiative that will support tobacco prevention and control research in 17 states. The model that NCI used for choosing those states that would be funded is described in Hall et al. (Operations Research, Vol. 40, pp. 1040–1052, 1992). In this paper, we present sensitivity analyses of the critical parameters of that model, and we discuss the policy implications for nationwide tobacco control efforts.