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Abstract
Economists, engineers, and others to formulate
and study methods to evaluate industrial research
and development R&D projects. In this paper,
my purposes are (1) to describe the results of
recent studies to measure (ex post) the social
benefits from industrial innovations, (2) to
indicate the sorts of ex-ante evaluation techniques
described in the literature and the extent
to which they are used by American firms, (3) to
provide measures of the biases and errors contained
in ex-ante estimates of development cost,
development time, and the profitability of new
processes and products, and (4) to indicate the
effects on probabilities of success of how
quickly ex-ante economic evaluations are made.