Peter C. Ordeshook and Kenneth A. Shepsle If the inaugural date of modern economics is set at 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, then the analytical tradition in the study of politics is not even a decade younger, commencing nine years later with the publication of the Marquis de Condorcet's Essai sur l'application de l'analyse iz la probabilite des decisions rendues iz la pluralite des voix. The parallel, however, stops there for, unlike Smith and other classical economists who laid an intel lectual foundation upon which a century of cumulative scientific...

The persistently increasing scale and complexity of government, of quasi public organizations, and of private organizations pose many problems in the economics of collective choice. Moreover, education as a quasi-public good has drawn ever more heavily on public budgets. Yet economic research into collective behavior with respect to education has been sparse (with the partial exception of recent work on teacher unions). In view of these trends, it was decided that the third conference under the Ford-sponsored UK. jUS. Pro gramme in the Economics of Education should make the high-risk effort...

In the two decades since its inception by L. Zadeh, the theory of fuzzy sets has matured into a wide-ranging collection of concepts, models, and tech niques for dealing with complex phenomena which do not lend themselves to analysis by classical methods based on probability theory and bivalent logic. Nevertheless, a question which is frequently raised by the skeptics is: Are there, in fact, any significant problem areas in which the use of the theory of fuzzy sets leads to results which could not be obtained by classical methods? The approximately 5000 publications in this area, which are...