This volume contains the proceedings of the 1997 International Symposium on Operations Research (SOR' 97) held at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Sep tember 3-5, 1997. The symposium was organized under the auspices of the two German societies on Operations Research, namely the Deutsche Gesellschajt fur Operations Research (DGOR) and the Gesellschajt fur Mathematik, Okonomie und Operations Research (GMOOR). During their annual business meetings, the DGOR and GMOOR members unanimously decided that their societies should be assimi lated by the newly founded Gesellschajt fur Operations...

Usually, the first edition of a book still contains a multiplicity of typographic, con ceptional, and computational errors even if one believes the opposite at the time of publication. As this book did not represent a counterexample to this rule, the current second edition offers a chance to remove at least the known shortcomings. The book has been partly re-organized. The previously rather long Chapter 4 has been split into two separate chapters dealing with discrete-time and continuous time approaches to nonlinear economic dynamics. The short summary of basic properties of linear dynamical...