Nearly optimal linear programming solutions: Some conceptual issues and a farm management application

Nearly optimal solutions in linear programming provide useful information to decision makers. Modeling to generate alternatives may be used to generate a set of nearly optimal solutions from which a decision maker may select the desired solution by considering criteria not quantified in the model. The mathematical problem is to find vertices of a convex polytope. A pivoting method of vertex enumeration is used to generate all extreme-point nearly optimal solutions of an example problem involving selection of a marketing strategy for beef calves. Compared to the optimal solution, nearly optimal solutions have more diversity or use less cash or hired labor. Key words: farm management, linear programming, modeling to generate alternatives, nearly optimal solutions. During the last three decades, linear programming (LP) has been used extensively in agricultural eco-nomics research and extension. But extensive use does not alter the fact that the LP model is a sim-plification of reality. The well-known assumption