Misapplications Reviews: An Introduction

Our capacity to solve many kinds of difficult problems has grown enormously in recent years, because astounding advances in computer capability have been accompanied by major theoretical breakthroughs in operations research and statistics. But this progress, like most other advances, has its less savory underside. The widespread availability of sophisticated computer packages has put mathematical bazookas in the hands of some people who would be dangerous with an abacus. The result has been a distressing number of studies that contain everything but common sense, performed by individuals who do not know the underlying assumptions of the models they are using, let alone whether they are relevant to the problem at hand. All too often, exhaustive efforts to gather and analyze data have yielded no useful information about the question that motivated them.