ABSTRACT
Recent advances in the application of quantitative methods in economic theory and economic statistics have had a profound effect in all fields of applied economics. Modern Operations Research, which in the United States and Western Europe is rapidly transforming the management practices of private business, is a direct descendant of the mathematical theories of the profit-maximizing behavior of an individual firm. If twenty years ago one still could question whether detailed rational computations do in fact guide the behavior of an individual firm, today the number of instances in which this actually is the case is rapidly increasing.
