Suchergebnisse

When I began to prepare this talk, I recalled that the first such address I ever listened to helped persuade me to become an economic historian. It was Herbert Heaton's delightful "The Making of an Economic Historian," which began with a bit of elegant doggerel. If a discipline could produce such an address, I decided that this association was certainly worth joining. But alas, I was optimistic. I was to hear more erudite presidential addresses but few so witty and informative. Nearly all these rituals, in this association or others, have followed the traditional recipe so well summarized by Shepard Clough. In a systematic review of our past meetings Shep found that "most of our presidential addresses have been devoted to making suggestions for research (mostly to be undertaken by others), to delineating the broad 'tasks' of economic history, to defending the kind of work in which the speaker has been engaged, and to advocating some particular methodology in our discipline." Mine is no exception.

AbstractIn this paper we consider decision problems that can be described as linear decision models. These models have been traditionally solved using linear programming, fuzzy linear programming, multiple‐objective linear programming or 'what‐if' analysis. Using these approaches, one encounters a number of difficulties. We propose an 'evolutionary approach' to overcome these difficulties. In the proposed approach the decision maker does not have to precisely specify the model (i.e. the objective functions, the RHS values, etc.) at the beginning of the solution procedure. In fact, the model evolves as the solution procedure proceeds.