Forecasting and planning during international talks.

We study the problem of planning economic development under uncertainty in the outcome of arms reduction talks that influence the choice of a long-term development goal, either peaceful or defensive. Instead of two-stage planning, we consider multistage planning which is not purely guaranteeing but rather stochastically guaranteeing. We assume that predictions of probabilities for various outcomes of the talks that are needed for this are provided by experts. Compared to the results of the talks on previous stages, expert predictions are corrected with formal statistical methods. We illustrate the general foundations of our approach with a twosector dynamic model of the economy with the maximum principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]