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The article presents several abstracts of papers that were presented at the Winter Simulation conference held in San Francisco, California, January 17-19, 1973. One of the papers discusses that a model of human motivation is formulated on the basis of A.H. Maslow's need theory. Additionally, behaviors are selected by degree of tension and are reinforced by environmental reactions which facilitate or frustrate reduction of tension according to the aggressiveness of behavior. In the paper "Simulation of Sequential Production Systems With In-Process Inventory," by David R. Anderson, Brian D. Sellers, and Mohammed M. Shamma, a general class of simulation models of production lines is studied to formulate theories on system behavior. All of the systems have normally distributed processing times as an approximation to conditions often encountered in the manufacturing environment. The paper "Cased Goods Conveyor Simulator," by Donald A. Heimburger focuses on the Simscript Conveyor Program that models the flow of cased goods through an accumulating powered belt conveyor system.

The article discusses issues related to the College on the Practice of Management Science's prize competition in the year 1977. A major purpose of the College on the Practice of Management Science is to promote practice. Since there is a general feeling that practitioners do not normally publish their work, an attempt was made to devise a scheme, which would provide a continuing positive incentive for publishing practice. Given that personal gain is a strong motivator, the prize competition was devised. Members of the Council of the College on the Practice of Management Science served as judges. After having reviewed all abstracts, the judges considered each one for its responsiveness to the call for papers. Roughly half of the submissions were rejected on that basis. It was considered important to the judges to verify the claims of the various authors. Each author was personally contacted and asked to give references on impact. These references were high-level management personnel of the organization under study. The task of selecting the finalists was completed based on relative impact. Because of the diversity of the applications being reviewed, such a relative evaluation was difficult. The finalists were scheduled to present their work at a conference of the College on the Practice of Management Science held in conjunction with the joint ORSA/TIMS meeting in San Francisco, California in May 1977.