Growth in agriculture depends on many things but one of the most important is investment in agricultural research. Decision making in the agricultural research policy area can only be aided by access to better information. This article overviews a recent endeavor to move policy dialogue beyond...

The diverse modelling activity coming under a defined concept of Simulation is reviewed first through a general outline of suggested methodology and secondly through a survey of applications in agricultural economics and kindred disciplines. The review concludes with a consideration of present...

A method is developed for assessing the monetary value of additional information in the framework of a response process which involves interaction between controlled and uncontrolled factors. The method is illustrated through an analysis of the value of a rainfall predictor in determining...

Decision analysis, the practice of Bernoullian decision theory and Bayesian statistics, is reviewed in relation to its application in management. Aspects of the scaling of beliefs (probabilities) and preferences (utilities) are discussed, focussing on practical problems. It is concluded that the...

The authors analyze the considerations that lead policymakers to undertake extension investments as a key public responsibility, as well as the complex set of factors and intra-agency incentives that explain why different extension systems'performance vary. The authors provide a conceptual...

Some empirical problems which tend to receive inadequate attention in response analysis are discussed. These include the variation not explained by fitted production functions, the sensitivity of optima and profits to price changes, the cost of developing production functions and the value in...

Analysis of actual observations of response processes is a routine procedure in applied econometrics but methods of dealing with purely subjective probability distributions as response 'data' have seemingly not hitherto been worked out. The models and methods developed here go some way to...

Simple functions of random variables, such as sums, products, quotients and powers, arise in many applications in stochastic economics. It is sometimes convenient to determine the moments of such functions. Cases where this has been or can be done analytically are reviewed, and comments offered...