EDITORIAL FOREWORD TO THREE UKRAINIAN/ RUSSIAN PAPERS IN DECISION SCIENCE

摘要

How did research fare in the countries who were once behind the Iron Curtain? The scarcity of trips in foreign, especially western, countries, and the difficulty of maintaining subscriptions to journals selling in hard currencies were reasons for which one should ask the question. In the social sciences, ideological constraints were, in addition, powerful limitations to the development of new models in the communities of scientists in those countries. Decision science, especially the related mathematical models, partly escaped these limitations, at least the last one of them, and benefited from the strength of the mathematical school in those countries. It is a very happy coincidence that the two Ukrainian papers and the Russian one we publish today in the following pages appear in the very period where democracy finally has been restored in Ukraine.