4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
The plan promising the highest expected national income may not offer the most dependable result. In this essay, reprinted in 1969, Gerhard Tintner and Jati K. Sengupta make that tension concrete through stochastic linear programming and applications to Indian economic planning. Their distinctive move is to separate estimating the distribution of possible optimal outcomes from choosing resource allocations according to a planner’s attitude to risk. In their adaptation of Mahalanobis’s two-sector growth model, one allocation yields the highest expected terminal income among those examined; another sacrifices some expectation for lower variance and a stronger lower-tail outcome. The essay shows what deterministic optimization conceals: uncertain coefficients affect not only the calculated target but also the grounds on which one policy should be preferred to another.