Abstract
“Shall I refill my oil tank?” This will depend on how much oil is left: a ‘decision rule’ now known as S — s policy (Essay 19), an early form of what became, in greater depth and for wider fields, ‘dynamic programming’: Bellman (1957), Arrow et al. (1958), followed by many others. The topic is also touched upon in Parts One and Three (e.g., Essays 11, 37), but the emphasis of Part Two is on the problem of an ‘organizer’, a ‘meta-decider’: on what kind of information shall he base decisions? In Essays 23, 25, 29–32 (and also in Marschak (1971)) organization is a ‘single-person team’. The more general problem of optimally assigning the tasks (inquiring, communicating, deciding) and incentives to a network of persons is treated in Essays 20–22, 24 and in the author’s more recent work (1974a, b). In the book by Marschak and Radner (1972), the ‘Epilogue’ takes up the case of a stable non-team organization: a game-theoretical problem since some tasks and incentives are subject to bargaining; see also Radner (1972).
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Marshak, J. (1974). Introductory Note. In: Economic Information, Decision, and Prediction. Theory and Decision Library, vol 7-2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9278-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9278-4_1
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