The Role of Operations Research in Public Policy

This paper reflects on the role Operations Research (OR) has and has not played in public policy. It is based on a plenary talk delivered on September 4,2002 to the International Conference on OR held in Klagenfurt, Austria. It concludes that OR clearly makes many important contributions to public policy making, but relatively speaking OR makes the smallest contribution to strategic issues for which authority is distributed and for which the “physics” of the underlying system are not central. One reason is that there are so many layers of people between the typical Operations Researcher and the key policy makers. OR models and model results are not effective from such a distance because they are distorted and diluted each time they are translated. An alternative path of influence would be to modify OR curricula so that people with OR training can take jobs “closer” to the key policy makers.