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Author : Jae Hyung Min
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (247 download)
Download or read book Decision Making Models for an Insurance Company Under Uncertainty written by Jae Hyung Min and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262331713
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)
Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Mykel J. Kochenderfer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.
Author : Spaseski, Narela
Publisher : IGI Global
ISBN 13 : 1522532609
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (225 download)
Download or read book Alternative Decision-Making Models for Financial Portfolio Management: Emerging Research and Opportunities written by Spaseski, Narela and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics is an integral aspect to every successful society, yet basic financial practices have gone unchanged for decades. Analyzing unconventional finance methods can provide new ways to ensure personal financial futures on an individual level, as well as boosting international economies. Alternative Decision-Making Models for Financial Portfolio Management: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that discusses methods and techniques that make financial administration more efficient for professionals in economic fields. Featuring relevant topics such as mean-variance portfolio theory, decision tree analysis, risk protection strategies, and asset-liability management, this publication is ideal for academicians, students, economists, and researchers that would like to stay current on new and innovative methods to transform the financial realm.
Author : Ettore Piccirillo
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9812770089
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (127 download)
Download or read book Guidebook for Supporting Decision Making Under Uncertainties written by Ettore Piccirillo and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2008 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides much-needed guidance in making sound business decisions for the business leader or decision maker, especially investment appraisal practitioners such as strategic planners, business analysts, financial partners, and supply chain experts. By OC supply chainOCO, the authors mean the network of retailers, distributors, transporters, storage facilities and suppliers that participate in the sale, delivery and production of a particular product. The book begins with an introduction to the concept of decision making under uncertainty and the forces driving the business. A gap in the current knowledge is then discovered as it arises from an analysis of the profitability indicators that are currently being used. With hands-on experience in decision making within the supply chain environment, and coupled with leading-edge mathematical and business formulations, the authors propose how to enrich quantitative and qualitative decision-making measures. This further leads to a decision-making framework and process, supported by a ready-to-use tool (PADOVA). Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Decision Under Uncertainty (163 KB). Contents: Decision Under Uncertainty; Critical Review of Accounting Performance Measures; Critical Review of Strategic Criteria; A Way Forward: Quantitative Decision Making Measures; A Way Forward: Qualitative Decision Making Measures; The Framework. Readership: Investment appraisal practitioners such as strategic planners, business analysts, financial partners, and supply chain experts alike; graduate-level students in business administration or operations management."
Author : Ricardas Zitikis
Publisher : MDPI
ISBN 13 : 3039285165
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (392 download)
Download or read book Risk, Ruin and Survival written by Ricardas Zitikis and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing techniques for assessing various risks and calculating probabilities of ruin and survival are exciting topics for mathematically-inclined academics. For practicing actuaries and financial engineers, the resulting insights have provided enormous opportunities but also created serious challenges to overcome, thus facilitating closer cooperation between industries and academic institutions. In this book, several renown researchers with extensive interdisciplinary research experiences share their thoughts that, in one way or another, contribute to the betterment of practice and theory of decision making under uncertainty. Behavioral, cultural, mathematical, and statistical aspects of risk assessment and modelling have been explored, and have been often illustrated using real and simulated data. Topics range from financial and insurance risks to security-type risks, from one-dimensional to multi- and even infinite-dimensional risks. The articles in the book were written with a broad audience in mind and should provide enjoyable reading for those with university level degrees and/or those who have studied for accreditation by various actuarial and financial societies.
Author : Jean-Paul Laurent
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319297767
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (192 download)
Download or read book Modelling in Life Insurance – A Management Perspective written by Jean-Paul Laurent and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on life insurance and pensions, this book addresses various aspects of modelling in modern insurance: insurance liabilities; asset-liability management; securitization, hedging, and investment strategies. With contributions from internationally renowned academics in actuarial science, finance, and management science and key people in major life insurance and reinsurance companies, there is expert coverage of a wide range of topics, for example: models in life insurance and their roles in decision making; an account of the contemporary history of insurance and life insurance mathematics; choice, calibration, and evaluation of models; documentation and quality checks of data; new insurance regulations and accounting rules; cash flow projection models; economic scenario generators; model uncertainty and model risk; model-based decision-making at line management level; models and behaviour of stakeholders. With author profiles ranging from highly specialized model builders to decision makers at chief executive level, this book should prove a useful resource to students and academics of actuarial science as well as practitioners.
Author : Esteban Jose Mendez Chacon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (114 download)
Download or read book Essays in Decision Making Under Uncertainty and the Political Economy of Institutions written by Esteban Jose Mendez Chacon and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two lines of research. The first line focuses on decision making under uncertainty. Specifically, I analyze the nature of risk preferences in life-insurance choices, and I examine adverse selection and moral hazard in private-healthcare markets in a context where the government provides universal healthcare. The second line focuses on the political economy of institutions, and I study the impact of a multinational company on the economic development of its host country during and after its tenure. In Chapter 1, I estimate a structural model of risk preferences from the choice of insured amount in life-insurance contracts. The literature investigating life-insurance purchases has mostly focused on survey data to estimate how demand for insurance depends on demographic and socioeconomic factors, leaving aside the task of estimating an underlying model of decision making that generates this demand. Using proprietary data on life-insurance choices, I estimate a model of risky choice to explain households' decisions. My results indicate that, in addition to standard risk aversion (decreasing marginal utility for wealth), including decision weights that might differ from the actual probabilities improves the fit of the model. These weights can be interpreted as a combination of state-dependent utility and probability distortions. Moreover, I find support for the existence of heterogeneity in preferences. Women are more risk averse than men, and the decision weights vary depending on gender and age. In Chapter 2, we investigate adverse selection and moral hazard in private healthcare in markets where the government provides universal healthcare. We use proprietary data on health-insurance choices and medical expenditures to examine asymmetric information in this institutional setting. We disentangle adverse selection and moral hazard by leveraging variation in copays and deductibles implemented by the insurance company, and the fact that, for a sample of customers, the insured amount was exogenously assigned, shutting down the adverse selection channel. We find evidence for the presence of asymmetric information, both in the form of adverse selection and moral hazard. Moreover, we develop a model that incorporates sources of heterogeneity that could potentially explain selection in this institutional setting, namely risk aversion, risk type, concern for health, and taste for convenience services offered in the private healthcare sector. In Chapter 3, we analyze the impact of large-scale FDI on economic development by studying the case of the United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Costa Rica from 1889 to 1984. We implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land, and census data geo-referenced at the census-block level for 1973, 1984, 2000 and 2011. These allow us to identify the company's effect during its tenure, and after it stopped production. We find that former "UFCo lands" have had higher living standards and better economic outcomes than counterfactual areas without the company's presence, and that convergence is slow. These findings are validated using nighttime lights data. Detailed historical data suggest that the mechanisms behind our results are.
Author : Jonas Ekblom
Publisher : Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN 13 : 9176852024
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (768 download)
Download or read book Decision Making under Uncertainty in Financial Markets written by Jonas Ekblom and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis addresses the topic of decision making under uncertainty, with particular focus on financial markets. The aim of this research is to support improved decisions in practice, and related to this, to advance our understanding of financial markets. Stochastic optimization provides the tools to determine optimal decisions in uncertain environments, and the optimality conditions of these models produce insights into how financial markets work. To be more concrete, a great deal of financial theory is based on optimality conditions derived from stochastic optimization models. Therefore, an important part of the development of financial theory is to study stochastic optimization models that step-by-step better capture the essence of reality. This is the motivation behind the focus of this thesis, which is to study methods that in relation to prevailing models that underlie financial theory allow additional real-world complexities to be properly modeled. The overall purpose of this thesis is to develop and evaluate stochastic optimization models that support improved decisions under uncertainty on financial markets. The research into stochastic optimization in financial literature has traditionally focused on problem formulations that allow closed-form or `exact' numerical solutions; typically through the application of dynamic programming or optimal control. The focus in this thesis is on two other optimization methods, namely stochastic programming and approximate dynamic programming, which open up opportunities to study new classes of financial problems. More specifically, these optimization methods allow additional and important aspects of many real-world problems to be captured. This thesis contributes with several insights that are relevant for both financial and stochastic optimization literature. First, we show that the modeling of several real-world aspects traditionally not considered in the literature are important components in a model which supports corporate hedging decisions. Specifically, we document the importance of modeling term premia, a rich asset universe and transaction costs. Secondly, we provide two methodological contributions to the stochastic programming literature by: (i) highlighting the challenges of realizing improved decisions through more stages in stochastic programming models; and (ii) developing an importance sampling method that can be used to produce high solution quality with few scenarios. Finally, we design an approximate dynamic programming model that gives close to optimal solutions to the classic, and thus far unsolved, portfolio choice problem with constant relative risk aversion preferences and transaction costs, given many risky assets and a large number of time periods.
Author : González-Prida, Vicente
Publisher : IGI Global
ISBN 13 : 1799832481
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (998 download)
Download or read book Advanced Models and Tools for Effective Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Risk Contexts written by González-Prida, Vicente and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business industries depend on advanced models and tools that provide an optimal and objective decision-making process, ultimately guaranteeing improved competitiveness, reducing risk, and eliminating uncertainty. Thanks in part to the digital era of the modern world, reducing these conditions has become much more manageable. Advanced Models and Tools for Effective Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Risk Contexts provides research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of effective decision making based not only on mathematical techniques, but also on those technological tools that are available nowadays in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as industrial informatics, knowledge management, and production planning, this book is ideally designed for decision makers, researchers, engineers, academicians, and students.
Author : Glenn Koller
Publisher : Chapman and Hall/CRC
ISBN 13 : 9781584881674
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (816 download)
Download or read book Risk Modeling for Determining Value and Decision Making written by Glenn Koller and published by Chapman and Hall/CRC. This book was released on 2000-05-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk or uncertainty assessments are used as aids to decision making in nearly every aspect of business, education, and government. As a follow-up to the author's bestselling Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Business and Industry: A Practical Guide, Risk Modeling for Determining Value and Decision Making presents comprehensive examples of risk/uncertainty analyses from a broad range of applications. Decision/option selection Manufacturing Environmental assessment Pricing Identification of business drivers Production sharing Insurance Scheduling and optimization Investing Security Law Emphasizing value as the focus of risk assessment, this book offers discussions on how to make decisions using each risk model and what insights the model can provide. The presentation of each model also includes computer code that encapsulates its logic and direction on how to apply the model to other types of problems. The author devotes a chapter to techniques for consistently collecting data in an inconsistent world and offers another chapter on how to reflect the effect of "soft" issues in the value of an opportunity. The book's final chapters delineate the techniques and technologies used to perform risk/uncertainty analyses, including sections on distribution, Monte Carlo process, dependence, sensitivity analysis, time series analysis, and chance of failure. Visit RiskSupport.com for more information!
Author : Mohammed Abdellaoui
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3540684360
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (46 download)
Download or read book Advances in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty written by Mohammed Abdellaoui and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.
Author : Vincent A. W. J. Marchau
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3030052524
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)
Download or read book Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty written by Vincent A. W. J. Marchau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.
Author : Louis Eeckhoudt
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1461509912
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (615 download)
Download or read book Risk and Medical Decision Making written by Louis Eeckhoudt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For people interested in risk management, medical activity represents a stimulating field of study and thought. On the one hand, progress in medical knowledge and technology tends to reduce the risks to survival that individuals would face in the absence of appropriate diagnostic or therapeutic instruments. On the other hand, new medical technologies simultaneously create their own specific risks, sometimes simply because their effects are less well-known than those of established ones. In a sense any medical progress simultaneously generates new risks while destroying old ones. Moreover, unlike many financial risks that can be either divided or transferred to others (e.g. through diversification, insurance or social security) the personal aspects of medical risks are by essence indivisible and non-transferable. As a result, they are in a sense more threatening than financial risks for risk averse patients. These two facts explain and justify the growing interest in risk economics for the fields of medical decision making and health economics. In Risk and Medical Decision Making, part 1 is developed inside the expected utility (E-U) model and analyses how comorbidity risks affect the well-known "test-treatment" thresholds. Part 2 is devoted to a specific non E-U model with the same purpose: how would one define a threshold in this context and how would one value a diagnostic test? In each of these two parts both diagnostic and therapeutic risks are considered.
Author : Bertrand Munier
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9780792330318
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (33 download)
Download or read book Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality written by Bertrand Munier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1994-10-31 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality presents original contributions to the areas of individual choice, experimental economics, operations and analysis, multiple criteria decision making, market uncertainty, game theory and social choice. The papers, which were presented at the FUR VI conference, are arranged to appear in order of increasing complexity of the decision environment or social context in which they situate themselves. The first section `Psychological Aspects of Risk-Bearing', considers choice at the purely individual level and for the most part, free of any specific economic or social context. The second section examines individual choice within the classical expected utility approach while the third section works from a perspective that includes non-expected utility preferences over lotteries. Section four, `Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Under Uncertainty', considers the more specialized but crucial context of uncertain choice involving tradeoffs between competing criteria -- a field which is becoming of increasing importance in applied decision analysis. The final two sections examine uncertain choice in social or group contexts.
Author : Giorgio Consigli
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319416138
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (194 download)
Download or read book Optimal Financial Decision Making under Uncertainty written by Giorgio Consigli and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scope of this volume is primarily to analyze from different methodological perspectives similar valuation and optimization problems arising in financial applications, aimed at facilitating a theoretical and computational integration between methods largely regarded as alternatives. Increasingly in recent years, financial management problems such as strategic asset allocation, asset-liability management, as well as asset pricing problems, have been presented in the literature adopting formulation and solution approaches rooted in stochastic programming, robust optimization, stochastic dynamic programming (including approximate SDP) methods, as well as policy rule optimization, heuristic approaches and others. The aim of the volume is to facilitate the comprehension of the modeling and methodological potentials of those methods, thus their common assumptions and peculiarities, relying on similar financial problems. The volume will address different valuation problems common in finance related to: asset pricing, optimal portfolio management, risk measurement, risk control and asset-liability management. The volume features chapters of theoretical and practical relevance clarifying recent advances in the associated applied field from different standpoints, relying on similar valuation problems and, as mentioned, facilitating a mutual and beneficial methodological and theoretical knowledge transfer. The distinctive aspects of the volume can be summarized as follows: Strong benchmarking philosophy, with contributors explicitly asked to underline current limits and desirable developments in their areas. Theoretical contributions, aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in the given domain with a clear potential for applications The inclusion of an algorithmic-computational discussion of issues arising on similar valuation problems across different methods. Variety of applications: rarely is it possible within a single volume to consider and analyze different, and possibly competing, alternative optimization techniques applied to well-identified financial valuation problems. Clear definition of the current state-of-the-art in each methodological and applied area to facilitate future research directions.
Author : Max Feinberg
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 3527845267
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (278 download)
Download or read book Quantification, Validation and Uncertainty in Analytical Sciences written by Max Feinberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2024-02-16 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantification, Validation and Uncertainty in Analytical Sciences Companion guide explaining all processes in measuring uncertainty in quantitative analytical results Quantification, Validation and Uncertainty in Analytical Sciences provides basic and expert knowledge by building on the sequence of operations starting from the quantification in analytical sciences by defining the analyte and linking it to the calibration function. Proposing a comprehensive approach to MU (Measurement Uncertainty) estimation, it empowers the reader to apply Method Accuracy Profile (MAP) efficiently as a statistical tool in measuring uncertainty. The text elucidates several examples and template worksheets explaining the theoretical aspects of the procedure and includes novel method validation procedures that can accurately estimate the data obtained in measurements. It also enables the reader to provide practical insights to improve decision making by accurately evaluating and comparing different analytical methods. Brings together an interdisciplinary approach with statistical tools and algorithms applied in analytical chemistry and written by two international experts with long-standing experience in the field of Analytical measurements and Uncertainty, Quantification, Validation and Uncertainty in Analytical Sciences includes information on: The know-how of methods in an analytical laboratory, effective usage of a spurious measurement and methods to estimate errors. Quantification, calibration, precision, trueness, MAP addons, estimating MU for analytical sciences, and uncertainty functions Employing measurement uncertainty, sampling uncertainty, quantification limits, and sample conformity assessment Decision making, uncertainty and standard addition method, and accuracy profile for method comparison Quantification, Validation and Uncertainty in Analytical Sciences is an ideal resource for every individual quantifying or studying analytes. With several chapters dedicated to MU’s practical use in decision making demonstrating its advantages, the book is primarily intended for professional analysts, although researchers and students will also find it of interest.
Author : J.K. Sengupta
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3642877206
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (428 download)
Download or read book Optimal Decisions under Uncertainty written by J.K. Sengupta and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of optimal decisions in a stochastic environment has seen many new developments in recent years. The implications of such theory for empirical and policy applications are several. This book attempts to analyze some of the impor tant applied aspects of this theory and its recent developments. The stochastic environment is considered here in specific form, e.g., (a) linear programs (LP) with parameters subject to a probabilistic mechanism, (b) decision models with risk aversion, (c) resource allocation in a team, and (d) national economic planning. The book attempts to provide new research insights into several areas, e.g., (a) mixed strategy solutions and econometric tests of hypotheses of LP models, (b) the dual problems of efficient estimation and optimal regulation, (c) input-output planning under imperfect competition, and (d) linear programs viewed as constrained statistical games. Methods of optimal decision rules developed here for quadratic and linear decision problems are applicable in three broad areas: (a) applied economic models in resource allocation, planning and team decision, (b) operations research models in management decisions involving portfolio analysis and stochastic programming, and (c) systems science models in stochastic control and adaptive behavior. Some results reported here have been published in professional journals be-. fore, and I would like to thank the following journals in particular: Inter national Journal of Systems Science, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applica tions and Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.
