Future World Oil Prices and Production Levels: A Comment

In a recent paper published in this journal, Marsballa and Nesbitt (1986) present an economist's point of view of OPEC pricing. In particular, they compute profit maximizing price strategies using a dynamic representation of the world oil market. The purpose of this paper is not to dispute the calculated numbers but to question the qualitative validity of the calculated optimal paths. The claim of this note is that it is very unlikely to generate smooth paths -- e.g. the price strategies shown in their paper -- the presented framework.