This volume comprises a comprehensive collection of original papers on the subject of estimating functions. It is intended to provide statisticians with an overview of both the theory and the applications of estimating functions in biostatistics, stochastic processes, and survey sampling. From the early 1960s when the concept of optimality criterion was first formulated, together with the later work on optimal estimating functions, this subject has become both an active research area in its own right and also a cornerstone of the modern theory of statistics. Individual chapters have been...