This study is the result of an interest in the economic theory of production intermittently pursued during the past three years. Over this period I have received substantial support from the Office of Naval Research, first from a personal service consulting contract directly with the Mathematics Division of the Office of Naval Research and secondly from Project N6 onr-27009 at Princeton Univer sity under the direction of Professor Oskar Morgenstern. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the .Office of Naval Research for this support and to Professor Morgenstern, in particular, for his interest in the puolication of this research. The responsibility for errors and omissions, how ever, rests entirely upon the author. Professor G. C. Evans has given in terms of a simple total cost function, depending solely upon output rate, a treatment of certain aspects of the economic theory of production which has inherent generality and convenience of formulation. The classical approach of expressing the technology of production by means of a production function is potentially less restrictive than the use of a simple total cost function, but it has not been applied in a more general form other than to derive the familiar conditions between marginal productivities of the factors of produc tion and their market prices."

The first of its kind, a seminar on Production Theory was held at the University of Karlsruhe during May and June 1973. Seven of the nineteen resource participants were from Canada, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.S.A., to make the seminar an international symposium. The other par- ticipants involved a variety of experts from German univer- sities. Karlsruhe supplied the predominant part of the Ger- man contributors. For the discussions of the seminar twenty papers span- ning a large part of production theory were prepared and these papers are herewith published as a coherent collection under the title: KARLSRUHE SEMINAR ON PRODUCTION THEORY. Papers on scalar valued production functions are orga- nized in Part 1. Several of these provide new characteri- zations of CES productiop functions, partly in connection with technical progress, and two others are related to homothetic production functions. Six papers on multisectoral production models have been included in Parts 2 and 3, addressed in part to problems of dynamic structures, disaggregation and relaxation of simple homogeneity. Turning next to more general production models, Part 4 contains five papers involving set valued production func- tionsor production correspondences, dealing with such topics as efficient pOints, stochastic aspects, homogeneity, homo- theticity and the law of diminishing returns.