However, it was not until early 1998 that we actually held the workshop. Support for the workshop was provided by this Journal, the Southern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service, the Center for Forest Business at the Warnell School of Forest Resources at the University of Georgia, and the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The eight papers presented in this special issue represent selected and edited papers from the workshop. In the past decade, many papers have addressed the question of when to harvest a stand when stumpage prices randomly fluctuate. The methodology of most of these papers has been adapted or developed from optimal stopping theory in mathematics, or more directly from economic search theory.
Harvesting corresponds to stopping, or a successful search.
The underlying structure of the fluctuating stumpage prices is the primary basis on which to characterize studies in this area. Empirical evidence of stumpage price fluctuations is mixed. For some stumpage price series, the hypothesis of a random walk cannot be rejected, while for other series the hypothesis of a random draw cannot be rejected. On the other hand, some stumpage price series are clearly autocorrelated, and in that case the hypotheses of both a random walk and a random draw may be rejected. Two papers in this issue, Brazee, Amacher and Conway, and Thorsen, address this specific question.