This book represents a departure from existing textbooks. Rather than covering methodology, the book introduces decision support systems through real world applications, and uses spreadsheets to model and solve problems. It uses management science techniques (statistics, simulation, probabilistic modeling and optimization), but only as tools to facilitate problem solving. The book embraces George Dantzig's dictum as its premise: "The final test of any theory is its capacity to solve the problems which originated it."

The book is used in the core MBA program at MIT's Sloan School of Management for the class titled: "Data, Models and Decisions". It is used in over ten universities in both core and elective classes, including Stanford University, Chicago's graduate school of Business, Babson College, among several others.

The book contains many real business cases from the authors' consulting experience. Instructor resources are available for faculty who have adopted the book for their course by contacting the authors directly @ dbertsim@mit.edu, rfreund@mit.edu )

About the Author

Dimitris Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He received his PhD from MIT in 1988, and he has been in the MIT faculty ever since. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and area editor of Operations Research. He has received numerous research awards including the Presedential Young Investigator award, Erlang prize and SIAM's best paper award in optimization.

Robert Freund is the Theresa Seley Professor of Operations Research at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1980, and he has been in the MIT faculty since 1983. He is former co-editor of Mathematical Programming and the winner of the teacher of the year award at Sloan school three times.

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