Both economists and businessmen are interested in knowing whether inventories are higher or lower than firms desire: Economists because it would provide a clue to the structure of business expectations, businessmen because it would give some indication of the future trend of business. In this...

Considerable attention in recent years has been devoted to the problem of meeting known demands or requirements over some finite number of planning periods at minimum cost. Representative of these problems is a problem that was first solved in the fundamental paper by Modigliani and Hohn...