ABSTRACT
In the years since their emergence during and after World War II, mathematical programming concepts and techniques — especially linear programming — have caught the imagination of the economics profession in its broadest sense. The long-established and prestigious grocery firm of Fortran & Muzak prepares and sells two blends of coffee beans under its own label. The blend marketed under the name ‘Cubano’ contains one fifth by weight of highly aromatic ‘alpha’ beans and four fifths of rather undistinguished ‘beta’ beans. Some preliminary assessment of the dual’s practical significance is in order. The shadow valuations identified in the dual solution and derived as by-products in the primal solution share the well-known characteristics of the concept of marginal revenue product in traditional micro-economic theory. The simplex solution rests for the time being at one of the corner points of the problem’s angular feasible solution space and the value of the problem’s linear objective function at that point is measured and recorded.
