How Useful would Operations Research?

[walt526]

How useful would an Intro to Operations Research course be (taught by a Statistics professor) be? This would be for the spring semester, so I'm interested mainly in better preparing for grad school rather than sending any sort of a signal to adcoms.

Research interests include Public Economics (including Law and Economics), IO, and other applied micro.

[zshfryoh1]

Originally Posted by walt526

How useful would an Intro to Operations Research course be (taught by a Statistics professor) be? This would be for the spring semester, so I'm interested mainly in better preparing for grad school rather than sending any sort of a signal to adcoms.

Research interests include Public Economics (including Law and Economics), IO, and other applied micro.

OR uses a mixture of statistical, stochastic, game and decision theory, dynamic programming and linear and non-linear optimization techniques. An intro level course might cover any mix of these topics, so without a course description, it would be hard to know, though the fact that it is being taught by a stats prof would imply an emphasis on stochastic techniques. However, I doubt it will be of much use given your interests. It is irrelevant to both public econ and applied micro. There is some overlap of techniques, and in the case of some B-schools even faculty, between theoretical IO and OR. However, judging from your other interests, it is more likely that you are interested in empirical IO, where there is minimal overlap between the two fields outside of statistical techniques, which the course probably does not cover since Intro to OR courses for math and stats majors courses tend to concentrate on the non-statistical techniques. For example, one of the most commonly used UG level OR texts, Hillier and Lieberman, has only 1 chapter on statistical techniques which is only on the supplementary CD plus a chapter on monte carlo techniques in the book.

[walt526]

Thanks. Here's the catalog description:

Formulation and analysis of mathematical models with emphasis on real systems applications. Introduction to Queueing theory and Markov Processes for application

[zshfryoh1]

I took a similar course covering the same topics, plus a few more topics. It is all stochastic techniques. Markov processes are used in a number of areas of econ, including theoretical IO, but not empirical IO. QT is not really used in econ much, though I have seen few papers using it in finance and theoretical IO.

[Gecko]

applied micro - hmm, markov processes can be used in labour search models.

[zshfryoh1]

Originally Posted by Gecko

applied micro - hmm, markov processes can be used in labour search models.

A Markov Process just means a random process that is memoryless. There are a lot of different types of Markov processes and a lot of different ways they can be used. An intro level OR course will probably only cover discrete Markov chains and some basic Markov decision processes which to my knowledge are not the types of Markov processes used in applied micro.

[Gecko]

ah~ thanks