A review of: “ENGINEERING ECONOMY, 4th. Ed.” By E. Paul DeGarmo The Macmillan Company 1967 532 pp. $10.95.

A risk measure, expected opportunity loss (EOL), is introduced to quantify the potential loss of making an incorrect choice in risk-based decision making. Different from Savage's (1951 Savage, L. J. 1951. The theory of statistical decision. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 46(253): 55–67. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) minimax regret principle, EOL can account for the unbounded continuous random outcomes of alternatives and decision makers’ acceptable risk. This article studies the effects of the forms of loss function, correlation among outcomes, and the acceptable risk on the ranking results by considering the loss function in the power form. The results show that the loss functions and the outcomes correlations can significantly influence the rankings of alternatives in risk-based decision making.     

A Review of: “THE CAPITAL BUDGETING DECISION” By Harold Bierman,Jr. and Seymour Smidt The Macmillan Company,New York,I960 246 pp. $6.00

The question posed is a complex one, and in order to clarify it the author describes the present shipping system operated by Matson. Fifteen cargo ships operate to Hawaii on a schedule of two sailings a week out of San Francisco, one sailing a week out of Los Angeles, and somewhat less frequent sailings out of Pacific Northwest ports – a total of about two hundred round trip voyages per year. Operating cost figures have shown that almost half of the total transportation costs from shippers' to consignees' doors is directly associated with cargo handling to and from the ship, and that this cost is steadily rising.     

A Review of: “ECONOMIC ANALYSIS FOR HIGHWAYS” By Robley Winfrey International Textbook Company 1969 923pp. $17.50

Five of the seven factors in most common use for compound interest calculations involve a uniform series of payments (or receipts). These interest factors, for use when interest is compounded at discrete points in time, are commonly referred to as the uniform series present worth factor, the uniform series compound amount factor, the capital recovery factor, the sinking fund factor and the uniform series gradient conversion factor. The proper use of these five factors requires that the period of time between the compoundings of interest coincide with the period of time between the uniform payments. If the interest is compounded more frequently (assume by an integer number of times) than the payments, then the best way to apply the compound interest factors is to determine the effective interest rate between payments. If interest is compounded less frequently than the payments (assume there are an integer number of payment periods within each compounding period), the correct solution procedure is not well known. Three methods are discussed for solving problems when interest is compounded less frequently than payments are made. It is argued that the method proposed in this note is better than the other two methods in popular use from both a theoretical and practical standpoint.     

A Review of: “PROFITABILITY AND ECONOMIC CHOICE” by Paul H. Jeynes The Iowa State University Press 1968 622 pp. $13.50

Semisolid die casting (SSDC) is a newly developed technology to improve the quality of products and to reduce the costs of liquid die casting process. We assessed the gas-induced semisolid process (GISS), which generates a semisolid metal for die casting, in this comparison of the costs per unit between a traditional liquid die casting process and the semisolid die casting process. A process-based costing model (PBCM) was created to estimate the production costs. In principle, the PBCM consists of three submodels: process model, operation model, and financial model. This study indicates that three main factors, namely cycle time, rate of waste, and die life, affected the unit production costs. The production cost estimates decreased by approximately 13% when the process was switched from a liquid to a semisolid one.     

A Review of: “OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES IN QUANTITATIVE ECONOMIC MODELS” By J. K. Sengupta and K. A. Fox American Elsevier Publishing Company,Inc. 1970 478 pp. $22.50

A survey of firms in the chemical, computer, and pharmaceutical Industries provides insight into Investment decision making practices under environmental/ social uncertainty. The practices are fairly simple, appropriate only when a new product is very similar to existing products. The practices ' perceived advantages and disadvantages establish a general blueprint for the development of new decision making techniques. The new techniques need to improve accuracy as much as possible without losing simplicity, and need to be generally acceptable to all the firms in the industry