Founded in 1976 and formally a part of INFORMS since 1998, OMEGA RHO is a Member of the Association of College Honor Societies and a foundation for excellence in Operations Research and Management Science disciplines.

OMEGA RHO DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2012

Incoming President, Graham Rand (left) and outgoing President, John Fowler (right) present Edward Prescott with his Honorary Membership of Omega Rho

In the Omega Rho Distinguished Lecture, Nobel laureate Edward Prescott reflected on his experience as an economist, statistician, and operations researcher. Prescott was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004 along with Finn Kydland for "their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles."

Prescott notably received a master's degree in operations research from the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1963. The speaker went on to earn a PhD in economics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1967. However, he attributes much of his success in economics to his earlier training in operations research.

At Case, Prescott studied queuing theory under Maurice Sasieni; in this course, he learned the recursive methods of dynamic programming that he would later apply to macroeconomics. Prescott noted that his economic work demonstrates that "[economic] policy is a game, not a control problem." Unlike earlier Keynesian models that indicated that the economy can be controlled by a central agent, Prescott and Kydland showed that rational agents respond to economic policy in a dynamic fashion, thus inducing a game-theoretic problem for policy makers.

Prescott also lauded operations researchers for their efforts in developing better production procedures. He noted that, despite their value to firms, operations researchers are often counted as expenses, not capital, in economic measures such as the gross domestic product. Prescott paraphrased Albert Einstein by saying, "Some things that count can't be counted." For Edward Prescott, operations research is one field that indubitably counts.

Tim Hopper (INFORMS blogger)

OMEGA RHO DISTINGUISHED LECTURE 2011

Why Good Simulations Go Bad

Simulation is a powerful tool to design, evaluate and improve the kinds of systems and processes that concern operations researchers and management scientists. Far from its early role as the brute force method of last resort, simulation now supports decision making both routine and critical. The software, and knowledge about how to use it, are widespread. But simulation frequently involves a large commitment of time, effort and money, and users often do not get everything they paid for; even worse, the results they do get may be seriously misleading. This talk describes common ways that good simulations go bad and how to avoid (or at least recognize) them. No background in simulation is assumed, and lots of examples will be provided to support the technical points.