The Fourth Purdue Symposium on Statistical Decision Theory and Related Topics was held at Purdue University during the period June 15-20, 1986. The symposium brought together many prominent leaders and younger researchers in statistical decision theory and related areas. The 65 invited papers and discussions presented at the symposium are collected in this two-volume work. The papers are grouped into a total of seven parts. Volume I has three parts: Part 1 -Conditioning and Likelihood; Part 2 -Bayes and Empirical Bayes Analysis; and Part 3 -Decision Theoretic Estimation. Part 1 contains the proceedings of a Workshop on Conditioning, which was held during the symposium. Most of the articles in Volume I involve either conditioning or Bayesian ideas, resulting in a volume of considerable interest to conditionalists and Bayesians as well as to decision-theorists. Volume II has four parts: Part 1 -Selection, Ranking, and Multiple Com­ parisons; Part 2 -Asymptotic and Sequential Analysis; Part 3 -Estimation and Testing; and Part 4 -Design and Comparison of Experiments and Distributions. These articles encompass the leading edge of much current research in math­ ematical statistics, with decision theory, of course, receiving special emphasis. It should be noted that the papers in these two volumes are by no means all theoretical; many are applied in nature or are creative review papers.