Abstract In the last months of 1966, an attempt was made to learn something about the extent and nature of the use of operations research techniques in American companies. Inquiry forms were sent to the entire membership of the Financial Executives Institute, asking for information about OR activities within their companies. The choice of this broadside approach, as compared with a selected sample, was in part a matter of cost; but it was more intended to make it easy for any firm in the entire group of companies to contribute whatever information it could, under the protection of anonymity for no attempt was made to identify respondents or companies. Other risks in such an approach were the obvious ones of getting a disproportionate number of replies from some one industry, geographic area, or an otherwise biased sample. It is possible that replies were made only by those companies sufficiently interested to contribute-because they had had such experience or encountered problems that could be dealt with by OR tools. It is also possible that other companies that had similar experience or interest did not reply because they preferred not to disclose what might easily be regarded as confidential information.
William J. Vatter (Sun,) studied this question.