Agricultural and Environmental Policy Models: Calibration, Estimation and Optimization

It is often thought that models are limited to algebraic representations and, as such, are hard to construct or interpret. This puts up an artificial barrier to mathematical models that often prevents an evolutionary approach to thinking about them. For this book, the point is to see mathematical models as a practical extension of the graphical models with which we started our micro economic analysis. Mathematical models allow us to explore many more dimensions and interactions than graphical representations, but often we can usefully use simple graphical examples to clarify a mathematical problem. With their larger number of variables, mathematical models can be specified in a more realistic manner than graphical analysis but are still limited by data and computational requirements.