SEMAINE D'ETUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIOQUE ETC. 487 
The median turns out to be of the order of 0.9, which 
means that in about 50% of all cases the value of the objective 
function (6.1) was reduced by the strategy approach by at least 
10% (when our yardstick is the distance from naivety to per- 
fection). Whether this is to be considered as much or as little 
is a question of taste; the present author must confess that 
he is not impressed by this figure. But a more important 
question is whether the strategy approach leads to sufficiently 
superior outcomes in general, and this can only be taught by 
future research. The results of Table 4 suggest further that the 
dispersion of the individual relative performances tends to de- 
crease when the standard deviation of the €’s becomes smaller. 
This is a somewhat surprising result if it would be true; to find 
out whether it is true or not requires a larger experiment. 
Simulation experiments are useful to show the random va- 
riability of outcomes whenever the model on which they are 
based is too complicated to be handled analytically by the 
ordinary methods of probability theory. The model used here 
cannot claim to be complicated, but, in a more general con- 
‘ext, it is not difficult to think of other models in development 
programming which do have this feature. Even in this simple 
case, however, the method illustrates clearly something which 
is obvious to those who think in probability terms but which is 
not so obvious to those who think in terms of nonstochastic eco- 
nomics; viz., that a procedure which is good in general is not 
necessarily good (at least not good in a limited time period) 
in all individual cases. For example, the relative performance 
measure is above I in almost 20%, of all cases. Thus, if we 
mation can be improved upon if we replace b by the reciprocal of 1 minus 
che x,_, of the fixed-plan policy, because it turns out (in the present 
application at least) that the fixed-plan savings ratios do not differ too 
much from the corresponding savings ratios of most of the strategy cases. 
This alteration would imply that the multiplicative coefficients of eq. (2.9) 
“ease to be constant over time, which makes the computations more comp 
cated, but probablv not in a hopeless manner 
Theil - pag. 2-