EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Abstract

The papers collected in this issue are united in a common view that it is rational to recognize that we have a poor perception of the constraints we face when making economic decisions and hence we employ decision rules that are robust. Robustness can be interpreted in different ways but generally it implies that our decision rules should not depend critically on an exact description of these constraints but they should perform well over a prespecified range of potential variations in the assumed economic environment. So, we are interested in deriving optimal and hence rational decisions where our utility or loss function incorporates the need for robustness in the face of a misspecified model. This misspecification can involve placing simple bounds on deviations from the parameters we assume for a nominal model, or misspecified dynamics, neglected nonlinearities, time variation, or quite general arbitrary misspecification in the transfer function between the input uncertainties and the output variables in which we are ultimately interested.