QUALITATIVE REASONING IN BUSINESS, FINANCE, AND ECONOMICS - INTRODUCTION

This special volume of Decision Support Systems includes six papers on Qualitative Reasoning in Business, Finance, and Economics. These papers represent a growing interest in using the techniques of Qualitative Reasoning - an approach to formulating and solving physics and engineering problems which has undergone much recent development within the field of Artificial Intelligence - in intelligent decision support systems. Readers of this journal need no introduction to the issues in decision support systems in general, but a short introduction to the field of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) from the perspective of Artificial Intelligence is a useful prologue to the papers themselves. This introduction is necessarily the personal view of the editors, an addition to the many views of QR that have been published and debated elsewhere [2,4,5,7,15,16]